Barbara Lee Responds to New Global AIDS Treatment Numbers
(Oakland, CA) – Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-Oakland), long recognized as a Congressional leader in the fight against HIV/AIDS, responded to newly released numbers that show that two programs she led efforts in Congress to create are providing antiretroviral therapy to 1.2 million people worldwide.
“While the numbers show that we have made some advances, our efforts moving forward should be guided by an urgent awareness that the HIV/AIDS epidemic is still spreading faster than we can treat it.
“According to the World Health Organization 6.8 million people need antiretroviral therapy now. Although WHO’s overall treatment statistics will not come out until early next year, the number announced today by the President clearly shows that millions of people who need immediate treatment will not get it.
“The bottom line is that the rate of progress is just not fast enough. We need to ensure that PEPFAR and the Global Fund have the resources and the ability to rapidly scale up their programs to build health capacity and infrastructure and enroll new patients in treatment programs.
“We also need to make sure that our efforts to stop the spread of the disease are supporting prevention programs that work, which is why I will be reintroducing legislation to remove the 33 percent abstinence-only-until-marriage earmark, which is undermining our prevention efforts.”
This morning the President announced that as of the end of September, 1.2 million people were receiving antiretroviral therapy through the combined work of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS Tuberculosis and Malaria and the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). This number represents an approximate doubling over similar numbers released last year which indicated that at least 641,000 people (after adjusting for double counting) were receiving antiretroviral therapy from the Global Fund and PEPFAR at the end of September 2005. In June 2006 during the UN General Assembly Special Session on HIV/AIDS the World Health Organization announced that overall about 1.6 million people were receiving antiretroviral therapy throughout the world. The WHO is expected to announce a new overall treatment number early next year to reflect the number of people worldwide who were receiving treatment as of December 2006.
Lee was a coauthor of the bipartisan legislation that established PEPFAR, which designated $15 billion for the prevention, care, and treatment of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. She also co-authored the Global AIDS and Tuberculosis Relief Act of 2000, which established the framework for the Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. To date, the Global Fund has committed $4.4 billion in 128 countries to support aggressive interventions against HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. In 2005, she successfully passed legislation to focus U.S. foreign assistance on the impact of AIDS on orphans and vulnerable children in developing countries.
###