Abstract

The AIDS Challenge

The article comments on U.S. President George W. Bush's AIDS bill. This World AIDS Day we were greeted by new, more accurate data from the World Health Organization (WHO) confirming the astonishing scope of the global epidemic: Some 40 million are now infected, with 5 million new infections and 3 million deaths in 2003 alone. AIDS is the greatest health crisis in human history--it has long since dwarfed the black plague--and it threatens to become a profound political and economic crisis as well. The containment of SARS shows what is possible. By contrast, the AIDS epidemic became what it is today because of a criminal failure of political will. But the tide is beginning to turn. Thailand and Brazil have become models within the developing world, the former for its energetic campaign of condom promotion, the latter for its aggressive use of discounted and generic drugs to treat its entire AIDS population. And with George Bush's $2.4 billion global AIDS bill, now awaiting a vote as part of Congress's omnibus spending package, the United States is finally devoting significant resources to the global crisis, a welcome step that would nearly double current aid levels and could make a significant contribution to the WHO's goal of treating 3 million impoverished people with AIDS by 2005. Yet Bush and Congressional Republicans have seriously compromised the bill's potential through their allegiance to corporate interests, social conservatives and a go-it-alone foreign policy.