Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2008. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
The New York Times - August 1, 2008
The only hitch is whether the money will actually materialize in the form of appropriations. The signs in Congress are not good.
The authorizing measure calls for $48 billion to be spent over the next five years - mostly for AIDS, with a significant portion for the other two diseases as well. That implies appropriations of roughly $9 billion to $10 billion a year. But advocacy groups say the amounts emerging from Congressional appropriations committees for fiscal year 2009 will be little more than half of that. If Congress can't come closer to the authorized amount, the global AIDS bill may turn out to be, as one leading advocate put it, "more rhetoric than reality."
Meanwhile, an advocacy group for black Americans has come up with a startling insight into the AIDS epidemic in this country by contrasting it with the global epidemic. The Black AIDS Institute makes a persuasive case that the epidemic among black Americans is comparable to the epidemics in many of the countries that the administration is trying to help, either in terms of the number of people infected with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, (more than 500,000 in this country) or the routes of transmission. In some American cities, prevalence rates among blacks approach those in the most heavily affected countries in Africa.
The administration has not shown the same zeal to control this domestic tragedy that it has shown in the global campaign. Surely we should be doing as much to prevent the spread of the AIDS virus in our own communities as we are trying to do abroad.
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