Bush to Ask for $30 Billion for AIDS Fight

May 30th, 2007 12:00 PM UTC
By Virginia Simmons

At 1pm this afternoon, Bush will request a doubling of PEPFAR funding, from $15 to $30 billion over the next 5 years.

From this morning’s Washington Post:

“Bush announced the program [PEPFAR], the largest foreign-aid effort directed at a single disease in U.S. history, in his 2003 State of the Union address. Through last September, it was paying for anti-retroviral treatment for 822,000 people in the ‘target countries’ — 12 African nations, plus Guyana, Haiti and Vietnam.

The program also pays for drugs for 165,000 people elsewhere in the developing world, and it has provided short courses of medicine to more than 500,000 pregnant women — a strategy that has prevented about 100,000 infections to newborns, program officials say.

This year, an independent panel of experts assembled by the Institute of Medicine called the program ‘well positioned’ to help AIDS-devastated countries control epidemics.”

Learn more by tuning in to the president’s 1pm address and checking back to the ONE Blog just after.

TAGS: The ONE Blog