When East Timor gained independence from Indonesia in 2002, the US administration showed its support by pledging a $2m "Christening present" earmarked for the most fashionable cause of the period: an HIV prevention programme. The first problem was that there was no Aids problem in East Timor: only seven people in the entire country at the time had tested HIV positive. The second was that the money could have been far better spent on other urgent health needs to save thousands of lives.

Elizabeth Pisani, a journalist turned epidemiologist, was caught in the middle. When her employer, Family Health International, won the contract to spend the funding, she joked that they should use it to round up all the Timorese prostitutes and send them to Harvard.