Bush: AIDS ‘can be defeated’

updated 1:45 p.m. ET Dec. 1, 2006

WASHINGTON - President Bush marked Worlds AIDS Day as a time to remember the United States’ responsibility to help the 39 million people living with the disease around the world.

“The pandemic of HIV/AIDS can be defeated,” Bush said Friday in the Roosevelt Room, where he and the first lady met with Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt, U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator Mark Dybul and community leaders from the U.S. and Africa.

“It’s a day, as well, for the United States to remember that we have a duty to do something about this epidemic — this pandemic,” Bush said about the disease, which has killed 25 million people.

Events around the globe included somber religious services, boisterous demonstrations and warnings that far more needs to be done to treat and prevent the disease in order to avert millions of additional deaths.

Some public health experts are saying the current focus on universal access to lifesaving antiretroviral drugs has had an unintended effect: sidelining prevention. Without a vaccine, preventing HIV infections is key to controlling the pandemic.

What's working?
Circumcision, microbicides and microfinance are some of the most promising options being examined as potential ways to prevent the disease.

Rates of HIV infection continue to grow, with 4 million new cases worldwide every year. The battle continues to be waged even in countries that were previously models of control. Due to erratic condom use and the virus’ spread into new populations, like married women, HIV has made a worrying return to countries such as Thailand and Uganda.

On Friday, Bush called on Congress to reauthorize the $2.1 billion Ryan White Care Act, the largest federal program specifically for people with HIV/AIDS. Supporters say changes are needed in the act because AIDS in the U.S. has moved beyond urban centers into rural areas. But in September, they failed to overcome objections from senators in New York and New Jersey, states that stand to lose more than $70 million each under revisions to the act.

Bush’s AIDS initiative, announced in 2003, is the largest international health initiative dedicated to a single disease.

It targets 15 countries that are home to about half of the world’s 39 million people who are HIV-positive. The countries are: Botswana, Cote d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Guyana, Haiti, Kenya, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Vietnam and Zambia.

Meanwhile, new strategies that attempt to change the very environment of AIDS transmission are now being considered. A study published online Thursday in the British medical journal The Lancet describes how a microfinance project in South Africa cut women’s chances of domestic violence by more than half.

There is a strong link between HIV transmission and abusive relationships, with abusive men more likely to have multiple partners or to become violent if asked to use condoms.

“If you address the broader risk environment, women and communities can be quite creative in finding solutions,” said Dr. Julia Kim, one of the Lancet study’s authors.

In the study, 430 women in rural South Africa were loaned money to start small businesses. Most women sold fruit, vegetables, clothes or offered tailoring services. With economic and social independence, women were no longer obligated to remain in violent relationships.

'Need to run faster'
“We need to run faster to get ahead of the virus,” said Jennifer Kates, vice president and director of HIV policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, an independent U.S.-based organization that works on AIDS issues worldwide. Because the AIDS outbreak is accelerating, so too must the public health response.

Dr. Purnima Mane, a senior UNAIDS official, estimates that public health officials need to plan for at least the next two decades before seeing a substantial decline.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution. Only in sub-Saharan Africa is AIDS really hitting the general population. In the rest of the world, intravenous drug users, prostitutes and gay men are at highest risk.

INTERACTIVE The AIDS epidemic Cases and deaths around the globe

“You have to focus on where transmission is actually occurring,” said Dr. Kevin De Cock, director of the HIV/AIDS department at the World Health Organization. Surprisingly little information is available on how most HIV infections are acquired. Without that, it is difficult to know which interventions would be most effective.

Even when countries do know where AIDS is spreading the fastest, there is no guarantee they will focus on the epicenter. In Latin America, the disease primarily infects gay men. And in much of Russia and eastern Europe, it is drug users. Yet in both regions, most resources go toward educating general populations.

“We would make quite a bit of headway if countries acted on the information they had,” Mane said.

Governments must be held accountable for their choices, said Dr. Jim Yong Kim, an AIDS expert at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard University. Kim advocates “prevention scores,” which would rate governments on how appropriately their AIDS dollars were being spent.

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