Miami Herald - Sunday, May 05, 2002
Jackie Koszczuk, Herald Washington Bureau

This week, the House will consider more than doubling American support for fighting AIDS abroad, from $300 million this year to $700 million in fiscal 2003, which begins Oct. 1. The Senate will address the measure later.

The leading voices raising an alarm over the AIDS pandemic once belonged exclusively to movie stars and the political left, but now they include conservatives such as Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., and Franklin Graham, son of evangelist Billy Graham.

"It's an enormous health problem and we have to show leadership on this," said Sen. Rick Santorum, a conservative Republican from Pennsylvania who chairs the GOP caucus in the Senate.

The AIDS funding question has sparked intense debate within the Bush administration. Secretary of State Colin Powell and Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson are urging the president to increase his proposed $200 million budget for global AIDS programs. Bush's $200 million proposal is lower than any circulating on Capitol Hill.

"We could do more," Powell recently told members of a Senate foreign aid appropriations subcommittee. ``This is a catastrophe worse than terrorism. It's not once every now and again you have an incident. This is every day."

The sad statistics of AIDS remain daunting: 40 million people worldwide are infected with HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus.

More than half of them -- 28 million -- are in African countries south of the Sahara.

Each day, 8,000 people worldwide die from AIDS -- acquired immune deficiency syndrome -- and 14,000 are newly infected with HIV.

Attitudes in Congress changed significantly during the last two years as the pandemic spread beyond Africa into Russia and Asia, and activists stepped up pressure on lawmakers to act. Some lawmakers trekked to Africa to see the problem for themselves.

"Even members of Congress who are not believers in broad social good remember the image of holding an infant while he dies," said Paul Davis, a lobbyist for the Health GAP Coalition, which represents several organizations that are pushing for more anti-AIDS money.

Upon their return, these lawmakers have quietly pressed their colleagues for more money for AIDS prevention overseas.

INFLUENTIAL VOICE

Among the most persuasive has been Sen. Bill Frist, R-Tenn., a heart surgeon who is extremely influential in Congress on health issues.

Frist has made six trips to Africa since 1996 to treat indigent patients and to study the AIDS problem.

He was struck by the sight of dying victims lying two and three to a bed in a hospital in Kenya.

Frist said he came away convinced that industrialized countries could eradicate AIDS in the same way they wiped out smallpox in 1980 after many years of concerted efforts.

"It's a plague of biblical proportions, and it's growing every day," he said.

Such sentiments used to be rare on the right. The prevailing view of conservatives was expressed most candidly by the Rev. Jerry Falwell in 1983. "Herpes, AIDS, venereal diseases . . . are a definite form of the judgment of God upon a society," said Falwell, then leader of the Moral Majority, a conservative advocacy group.

Times and attitudes have changed since then, and the arch-conservative Helms gave the cause of AIDS relief an unexpected boost in a speech earlier this year. Helms, the former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he was ashamed of his failure to address the African pandemic.

The 81-year-old North Carolina conservative, who recently underwent heart surgery, said he wanted to atone before he retired from the Senate next January. He is sponsoring a bill with Frist that would provide $500 million to fight mother-to-child transmission of HIV overseas.

SEPARATE MEASURE

Another bill attracting bipartisan support would boost U.S. funding to $700 million; it's less specific than the Helms-Frist measure about how the money could be spent. Supporters are pressing hard to have this version included in a $27 billion emergency spending bill for the military, homeland security and the battle against terrorism. The House Appropriations Committee will take up the bill this week.

Bush opposes attaching the AIDS money to the anti-terrorism bill. House Republicans also resist the move. But supporters of more AIDS funding think this is their best shot at getting a big boost this year, because Bush is unlikely to veto the broad spending bill even if he dislikes its inclusion of AIDS funds.

Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., who is sponsoring the $700 million measure with Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said: ``I think the American people understand this. This isn't a problem in some other part of the world. This is a problem of our world, a problem that is, sadly, an airline flight away from being delivered to the United States every hour of every day."

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