By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Oct 31 2003 (IPS)

AIDS activists proclaimed a major victory in their fight to push the U.S. administration to spend more in the global battle against HIV/AIDS after the Senate voted Thursday to increase the U.S. contribution by nearly 300 million dollars in 2004.

Rejecting calls by President George W. Bush, senators late Thursday voted 89-1 to approve an amendment to the 18.4-billion-dollar 2004 foreign-aid bill that will add almost 298 million dollars to AIDS spending.

If approved by a House-Senate conference committee, which will hash out different versions of the underlying bill in coming days, the Senate action would make 2.4 billion dollars available to anti-AIDS programmes, particularly in Africa and the Caribbean, in the coming year.

The House version caps anti-AIDS spending at 2.1 billion dollars, the amount that Bush asked for in his initial budget request last winter.

The Senate vote was hailed by AIDS activists as a major victory in their fight to get Washington to contribute more money to containing and eventually rolling back the disease that now kills about 8,000 people worldwide daily.

Although about 75 percent of the victims are African, the disease is spreading quickly in India, China, Russia and other important countries on the Eurasian continent.

“Congress is rejecting the president’s claim that we cannot spend more to fight global AIDS,” said Paul Zeitz, executive director of the Global AIDS Alliance (GAA), a leader in the fight in Congress for more money.

“It is beginning to respond to the appeals of health experts, religious groups and concerned citizens who want to see a true emergency plan to stop AIDS,” he added in a statement.

At the same time, Zeitz and fellow activists warned that getting the additional 289 million dollars approved by the Senate past the conference committee may prove a difficult fight in light of the Republican leadership’s stronger loyalty to Bush in the House of Representatives.

He also noted that the 2.4 billion dollars, of which only about two-thirds will be devoted to on-the-ground anti-AIDS services, is still a fraction of what the United Nations has said is needed for a minimal response to the AIDS epidemic.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) and UNAIDS have estimated the need to be at least 10.5 billion dollars by 2005.

Bush surprised many AIDS activists last January when in his State of the Union Address he announced an emergency five-year, 15 billion-dollar anti-AIDS programme focused on Africa and the Caribbean.

More than 25 percent of the adult population of a number of southern African countries are infected by HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

But activists were later disappointed when, instead of calling for three billion dollars to be appropriated for the programme each of the five years, Bush called instead for a phased implementation beginning with only 1.9 billion dollars the first year.

The administration has argued that African health systems might not be able to efficiently administer more money, although public-health specialists dispute this.

In addition, the administration asked that only 200 million dollars of the total be allocated the first year to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, a two-year-old multilateral mechanism designed to speed assistance to proven anti-AIDS efforts on the ground.

The lack of conditions has made the Global Fund a target of Christian Right forces in Congress and the administration, who are concerned that programmes funded by it might support abortion services and other practices they oppose.

As a result, the Global Fund is now teetering at the edge of bankruptcy, and has been forced to reduce its grant portfolio in order to maintain operations.

The same coalition prevailed in Congress in requiring that one-third of all anti-AIDS funding abroad be used to promote abstinence as the preferred method of preventing the spread of AIDS.

Those moves have angered public-health specialists and anti-AIDS activists, who have been pressing hard for Congress both to increase funding for 2004 and to minimise the conditions on how the money should be spent.

While they have fallen short in the latter effort, they have succeeded in persuading Congress to increase aid.

The House bill provided 2.1 billion dollars, including 500 million dollars for the Global Fund, while the fact that the 2.4-billion-dollar appropriation by the Senate was passed by such an overwhelming bipartisan majority might make if difficult for the administration and House Republicans to roll back.

The amendment was co-sponsored by Ohio Republican Senator Mike DeWine and Illinois Democratic Sen Dick Durbin.

“This is the right thing to do. This will save lives,” said Dewine during the debate on the Senate floor just before midnight.

Several other amendments for additional anti-AIDS money and for relaxing conditions on how the cash could be spent were introduced by Democrats but were defeated in party-line votes.

Still, activists said the 289 million dollars was much better than nothing and promised to lobby hard for the extra money when the bill goes to conference.

”This is a step forward and welcome news for millions of people living in devastated countries,” said Zeitz who added, however, that the administration’s actions “still represent an abdication of leadership by the U.S., which historically has provided a third of global funding to confront major health threats.”

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