The Los Angeles Times - Tuesday, January 11, 2000
James Gerstenzang, Maggie Farley, Los Angeles Times

Gore said the fiscal 2001 budget that President Clinton will send to Congress next month will include $100 million to prevent and treat HIV and AIDS in Africa and Asia, and $50 million to purchase vaccines against diseases that take hold when immune systems are weakened by AIDS. That would bring the total U.S. commitment on fighting AIDS to $325 million in the next fiscal year.

Yet, the need is much greater: An estimated 23.3 million people are infected by HIV in Africa alone, and the funds, if approved by Congress, would provide barely 10 percent of the cost charged by a major pharmaceutical company for such vaccines.

Gore's address took on particular significance because the Security Council had never in its five decades and 4,000-odd meetings considered public health a threat to global security.

"When a single disease threatens everything from economic strength to peacekeeping, we clearly face a security threat of the greatest magnitude," Gore said.

"We tend to think of a threat to security in terms of war and peace. Yet no one can doubt that the havoc wreaked and the toll exacted by HIV (and) AIDS do threaten our security," Gore added.

"The heart of our security agenda is protecting lives -- and we now know that the number of people who will die of AIDS in the first decade of the 21st century will rival the number that died in all the wars in all the decades of the 20th century," he said.

Pointing to a landmark shift in the U.S. government's view of stability in the post-Cold War world, Gore continued: "We must understand that the old conception of global security, with its focus almost solely on armies, ideologies and geopolitics, has to be enlarged."

Environmental pollution, the spread of drugs and corruption, terrorism and "the new pandemics" that cross borders and lay waste to entire societies pose threats that are "as grave as war itself," he said.

The AIDS activist group ACT-UP criticized the amount of the U.S. financial commitment, calling it "a drop in the funding bucket." The International Association of Physicians in AIDS Care, a Chicago- based organization of 6,800 doctors in 43 countries, agreed that $150 million was not enough but said it would help save lives, "and every life has infinite value."

Dr. Peter Piot, executive director of UNAIDS, a consortium of U.N. agencies that has been providing assistance to a range of programs in Africa for several years, told the council that he estimated that his program needed $1 billion to $3 billion a year to fight AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa alone.

The crisis is particularly severe in Africa: According to the World Bank, 10 Africans are infected with HIV, the virus that causes acquired immune deficiency syndrome, every minute; in Zambia and Zimbabwe, a child born today has a greater chance of dying of AIDS than of living free of the disease. The White House predicts that, in the next decade, more than 40 million children in Africa will be orphaned by AIDS.

Namibia's health minister, Dr. Libertine Amathila, said AIDS was devastating her country's economy, robbing families of breadwinners and children of their parents.

"It is immoral that the worst affected continent has the lowest access to care," she said, urging that wealthy countries make drugs to treat HIV available at prices Africans can afford.

She cited statistics from UNAIDS that show only $165 million was spent on AIDS prevention in Africa in 1996, while estimates suggest that between $800 million and $2.5 billion a year is needed.

"It is worth pondering how the international community successfully mobilized hundreds of billions of dollars over the last few years to minimize the impact of that `other virus' -- Y2K," Piot told the council.

AFRICA'S TOLL

Some facts about the AIDS epidemic in Africa:

--An estimated 23.3 million Africans living south of the Sahara are estimated to have HIV or AIDS. Of the 16.3 million people worldwide who have died through 1999 as a result of HIV or AIDS, 13.7 million were in sub- Saharan Africa. Eastern and southern Africa are home to less than 5 percent of the world's population but have more than 50 percent of the world's HIV- positive people.

--AIDS is the leading killer in sub- Saharan Africa. In 1998, 200,000 people died as a result of armed conflicts in Africa, compared with about 2 million from AIDS.

--Life expectancy at birth in southern Africa, which rose from 44 years in the early 1950s to 59 in the early 1990s, is set to drop back to 45 in the next 10 years because of AIDS.

Source: Associated Press
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