This week the UN will hold a high level meeting on AIDS to review what — if any — progress has been made since the UN General Assembly Special Session on HIV/AIDS (UNGASS) in 2001. I’ll be writing more about UNGASS +5 in the days to come, but advance reports are not promising.

Heading the U.S. delegation will be First Lady Laura Bush, who’s been making the rounds in Africa lately on behalf of her husband’s controversial AIDS plan (PEPFAR). Joining her will be first twin Barbs, who’s apparently taking a break from partying hard at Bungalow 8 with socialite Fabian Basabe to pursue her secondary interest: global AIDS. Yes, post-Yale, post-campaign, post-hangover, Barbs has been working with Baylor College of Medicine’s International Pediatrics AIDS Initiative. Her volunteer work last year at a clinic in Cape Town was so shrouded in mystery that newspapers could only report at the time, “Bush daughter is said to volunteer” in South Africa. And lest Barbs get bored, she’s dragging along party pal Maggie Betts (daughter of Bush “pioneer” Roland Betts); both are official members of the 47-person delegation. Thankfully, Jenna is nowhere in sight.

The ideological heavy-lifting, however, will be executed by stalwart Christian conservatives. As Esther Kaplan reports, the U.S. delegation includes abstinence pusher Anita Smith (Co-chair of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS), Melissa Pardue (a former policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation who promotes abstinence-only education) and Baptist minister Herb Lusk (who advises Bush on faith-based community development). (Kaplan also notes a spike in Uganda’s HIV infection rate, which has doubled over the past two years as it implemented Bush’s prevention plan.)

None of this bodes well for UNGASS +5. While much will be decided in the days to come, according to Naina Dhingra, Director of Public Policy for Advocates for Youth, “the U.S. is sending a signal that it is not taking the meeting as seriously as it should by putting a non-political person at the head of the delegation and by filling it with people with no experience in HIV/AIDS or who don’t agree with the goals of the 2001 UNGASS declaration.”