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US approves $50bn to fight Aids
03/04/2008 09:31 - (SA)
Washington - The House of Representatives voted Wednesday to triple to more than $10bn a year US humanitarian spending on fighting Aids, malaria and tuberculosis in Africa and other stricken areas of the world.
About $41bn of the $50bn over five years would be devoted to Aids, significantly expanding a programme credited with saving more than one million lives in Africa alone. It is the largest US investment ever against a single disease.
Every day another 6 000 people are infected with the HIV virus, said House Foreign Affairs Committee chairperson Howard Berman, a Democrat. "We have a moral imperative to act and to act decisively," he said.
The House voted 308-116 to extend and broaden the scope of the $15bn President's Emergency Plan for Aids Relief that President George W Bush promoted and Congress enacted in 2003. It has been praised as a noteworthy foreign policy success of the Bush presidency.
The White House, which backs the House bill, said the programme is supporting anti-retroviral treatment for about 1.45 million people and is on track to meet its goals of backing treatment for two million, preventing seven million new infections and providing care for 10 million, including orphans and vulnerable children.
In 2007, 33 million people worldwide were living with HIV and Aids, according to the United Nations.
Death, poverty, despondency
Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, top Republican on the Foreign Affairs Committee, added that while the programme is based on altruism, it has strengthened US security.
Unless the United States deals with the Aids pandemic, she said, it "will continue to spread its mix of death, poverty and despondency that is further destabilising governments and societies and undermining the security of entire regions".
The compromise bill was one of the last endeavours of the former Foreign Affairs Committee chairperson, Democrat Tom Lantos, who died of cancer in February. The measure is named after Lantos and his predecessor as Foreign Affairs chairperson, the late Republican Henry Hyde, who worked with Lantos on the 2003 act.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has approved a similar $50bn bill, and the legislation is seen as having a good chance of passing in an election year in which few major bills will reach the president's desk.
Some restrictions
To advance the legislation, conservatives had to give up a provision in the 2003 act that required the spending of one-third of all HIV prevention funds on abstinence programmes. Instead it directs the administration to promote "balanced funding for prevention activities" in target countries.
Liberals, in turn, had to accept some restrictions on family planning groups participating in Aids programmes.
Conservatives, worried that money might be diverted to abortion promotion, pushed for a provision that allows the use of money for HIV/Aids testing and counselling services in those family planning programmes supported by the US government.
- AP
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