Newsday, December 2, 2000
Laurie Garrett, Staff Writer

The Global AIDS Research Initiative and Strategic Plan calls for spending more than $100 million next year on research conducted in poor countries, in collaboration with local and American scientists. It emphasizes the search for ways to prevent the further spread of HIV, which currently infects 36 million people worldwide.

The effort, to which NIH is committed in grant contracts extending in some cases beyond 2002, will be coordinated by a team of scientists, ethicists and policy makers called the Global Strategy Group.

The ambitious plan was formally unveiled by President Bill Clinton in a speech at Howard University to commemorate World AIDS Day.

"When nations are already struggling against great odds to build prosperity and democracy, it is time to say that AIDS is also an international security crisis," Clinton said.

Congress has yet to approve a budget for fiscal year 2001. Clinton urged the divided legislature to pass a historic $12 billion AIDS budget, more than double the AIDS budget at the start of his administration. That would include a $116 million international AIDS program; a $1 billion tax credit to private companies that develop AIDS vaccines; an NIH research budget of $2.1 billion (some $100 million of which falls under the newly released strategic plan); $105 million for HIV prevention efforts in the U.S.; and a $228 million increase in Ryan White Program funds that cover treatment and care for people infected with HIV in the United States.

"We are at a pivotal point in the pandemic," warned Dr. Anthony Fauci in a speech at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda on Friday. "The White House, Congress, foreign governments, international organizations, industry and philanthropies all have made major commitments to fighting AIDS."

The NIH has been without a permanent director for several months and must await the Oval Office's appointment of a leader-an eventuality that hinges on who wins the current election's fight. Within the NIH, the critical Office of AIDS Research is also without a director, and that slot must be filled by the newly appointed NIH director.

The seemingly leaderless scientific enterprise is charging ahead, however.

The 80-page strategic plan released by the NIH staff attests to a detailed commitment to research efforts in 27 African nations, 15 in Eastern Europe and the former USSR, 18 Asian countries, 29 in the Americas and several Western European nations. A total of 161 major studies are involved, targeting everything from research on behaviors that put people at risk for HIV to vaccine trials.

New York City released its latest AIDS figures Friday, showing that people continue to get newly infected with HIV despite vigorous AIDS education campaigns in the city. In 1995, there were 32,060 people living with AIDS in New York City. By the end of 1999 that number had reached 45,635. And for the first time since the AIDS treatment cocktails hit the market in 1996 the numbers of New Yorkers who died of AIDS increased, from 1,978 in 1998 to 2,020 in 1999.

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