The amount authorized for the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the successful U.S. global AIDS program, is $18 billion more than what Bush had requested. The measure will triple funding for these three diseases.
It would replace and expand the current $15 billion program started by the President in 2003. That act expires at the end of September. The new goal is to prevent 12 million new HIV infections, treat more than two million with AIDS drugs, support care for 12 million, and train at least 140,000 new health care workers.
According to a statement by the White House, the president said it "is the largest commitment by any nation to combat a single disease in human history."
The funds will assist in buying lifesaving anti-retroviral treatment for nearly 1.7 million people from Asia to eastern Europe. The new program will also drop a requirement for one-third of the anti-AIDS funds to be used to promote sexual abstinence and will lifts a ban on HIV-positive foreigners entering the United States.
The bill also sets up a policy framework on such closely related issues as gender, care for orphaned children, nutrition, and health care worker shortages. It currently operates in 15 focus countries and claims to support antiretroviral treatment for 1.4 million people worldwide.
Red Cross figures show about two thirds of the world's HIV-positive cases are in sub-Saharan Africa. At least one person in 10 with HIV lives in nations such as South Africa, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Swaziland and Zambia.
Malaria kills more than a million people each year, 90 percent of them in sub-Saharan Africa. The World Health Organization estimates that there are 14.4 million cases of tuberculosis worldwide in 2006.
