By Richard Cowan
Reuters
July 24, 2008
WASHINGTON, July 24
(Reuters) - The U.S. Congress on Thursday approved a large expansion of a
program to fight AIDS and other diseases raging in Africa and elsewhere,
sending the measure to President George W. Bush, who is expected to sign it
into law.
By a vote of 303-115,
the House of Representatives passed the bill authorizing $48 billion over the
next five years to help treat and prevent AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. That
is up sharply from the $15 billion Congress initially funded for the first five
years of the program that began in 2003.
The Senate passed an
identical bill on July 16.
Despite authorizing
the funds, Congress must still pass separate legislation to deliver the money.
It is unclear whether that will occur in this election year as Democrats and
Republicans wrangle over the budget.
House Foreign Affairs
Committee Chairman Howard Berman, a California Democrat, said expanding the
program "will allow us to significantly boost the health care
workforce" in countries hard-hit by AIDS "and to increase the number
of HIV-positive individuals receiving life-saving medicine."
Bush had requested
$30 billion for 2009 to 2013, but has signaled a willingness to go along with
the $48 billion for a signature program of his presidency.
Amid broad support
for the legislation in Congress, some conservative Republicans said its huge
cost was ill-advised, especially when the
"We have big
hearts, but we need to use our brains. We cannot afford $50 billion of
generosity to foreigners," said Rep. Dana Rohrabacher of
Democratic Rep. Henry
Waxman, also of
FULL FUNDING URGED
David Bryden, a spokesman for the Global Aids Alliance, which
focuses on poor countries hit hardest by the pandemic, urged Congress to follow
through with full funding for the program.
"The Democratic
leadership in the budget and appropriations committees have
the responsibility to provide the funding needed to implement this crucial
bill."
"Otherwise, from
a funding perspective, Congress is more talk than action on these
diseases," Bryden wrote in an e-mail to Reuters.
The President's
Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, has provided AIDS treatment drugs to
nearly 2 million people. It also has helped prevent the infection of 150,000
infants who likely would have contracted the human immunodeficiency virus from
their mothers during pregnancy or childbirth. HIV is the virus that causes
AIDS.
Despite the heralded
success of PEPFAR, an estimated 2.1 million people died of AIDS-related causes
last year, with an estimated 2.5 million newly infected, according to the
United Nations.
The
The legislation will
also lift a U.S. ban, in place since 1987 during the administration of
President Ronald Reagan, which prohibited HIV-positive foreigners from visiting
the
According to the
World Health Organization, malaria kills more than 1 million people a year, 70
percent of whom are young children. One-third of the world's population is
infected with the tuberculosis bacterium, killing 1.6 million a year.
Last week, former
U.S. President Bill Clinton announced a deal between a foundation he runs and
Chinese and Indian companies to reduce the price of a key malaria drug by
one-third.