HIV/AIDS Funding

HIV/AIDS FUNDING

Mr. DeWINE. Mr. President, I rise this morning to draw my colleagues' attention once again to an issue that is plaguing our world. That issue, of course, is the tragic global HIV/AIDS endemic.

The Los Angeles Times newspaper ran a particularly heartbreaking piece this past Sunday that detailed the HIV/AIDS crisis in Africa. I will take a moment to read an excerpt from this article, as it paints a very disturbing and very accurate picture of the reality of this global HIV/AIDS crisis. This is last Sunday's Los Angeles Times:

The mother rises from her deathbed to bury her baby boy. She slumps in a wheelchair borrowed for the occasion, and an elderly relative must help hold her head up so that she can watch the body descend into the red earth.

The casket is heartbreakingly small, and though Evelyn Matule weeps for her child, her eyes are dry. Sickness and despair have stolen her tears.

Alfred is the second boy Matule has lost in a year to a disease also racking her body: AIDS. A toddler's coffin is mercifully inexpensive, but the earlier death left Matule and her family so strapped that they will serve only butter sandwiches to the few guests.

On one side of the boy's grave in this township outside the city of Welkom in central South Africa are fresh heaps of loam, each new grave marked with numbered aluminum tags, baby rattles and prescription bottles for remedies that didn't save the victims. A dozen open graves lie to the right. In less than a month, they will be full.

Mr. President, this is the reality of AIDS. Today, one in every nine South Africans—that's 4.7 million people—has AIDS. Last year alone, 2.4 million people in sub-Saharan Africa died from AIDS. Furthermore, over 34 million children worldwide have lost one or both parents to AIDS or related causes.

As the LA Times article points out, the City of Johannesburg is expecting to have 70,000 burials a year by 2010—that's up from 15,000 burials just five years ago.

This is having a huge economic impact on the African Continent, both in terms of a reduced agricultural capacity and also just in terms of the costs of burials and funerals. As morbid as it may sound, there is, quite literally, a shortage of undertakers and cemetery space in Africa, and it is adding to an already tragic health crisis.

As we all know, Mr. President, HIV/AIDS is a global problem, with a huge impact and devastating impact in our own Hemisphere. I have seen it in Haiti, a nation with the second highest prevalence of HIV/AIDS in the world—second only to sub-Saharan Africa. My wife, Fran, and I have traveled to Haiti nearly ten times—and we are planning another trip for next week. We have seen, first-hand, the devastation of HIV/AIDS—we've seen the children, the babies, and the families. It is a true human tragedy.

An estimated 300,000 Haitians—and that is out of a population of only 8 million—are currently living with AIDS. According to the Centers for Disease Control projections, Haiti will experience up to 44,000 new HIV/AIDS cases this year. That is at least 4,000 more than the number expected in the United States, a nation with a population nearly 35 times larger than Haiti's.

This disease is having a profoundly devastating impact on Haitian children. Already, estimates suggest that HIV/AIDS has orphaned 163,000 children in Haiti, a number expected to skyrocket to between 323,000 to 393,000 over the next 10 years. Haiti also continues to suffer from an unbelievably high HIV transmission rate from mother to child, and, of course, two-thirds of the infants born with the disease, we know, will die within the first year.

This truly is a tragedy because we know that the transmission of HIV from mother to child can be substantially reduced with proper counseling and proper medication. The reality is that millions of children are dying, and we can do something about it. We must do something about this.

I was pleased, to join my friend and colleague from Illinois, Senator Durbin, in leading an effort to show the Senate Appropriations Committee our support for increasing funds to combat this horrible disease. In a letter to the Committee signed by fourteen fellow Senators, we have asked for the full appropriation of $236.4 million in additional FY03 funds to fight global AIDS. This would bring our nation's total 2003 AIDS spending level to $1.5 billion—that's a 50 percent increase over 2002 levels.

Furthermore, I look forward to working with Majority Leader FRIST and Senator Santorum in the coming months to not only increase our overall contribution to fight global AIDS, but to work to ensure that our funds are being spent in the most efficient and effective ways.

At the end of the day, I believe that all of us in this Chamber are working toward the same objective—and that is to alleviate the continued suffering caused by this epidemic.

Quite simply, we have a moral obligation to do so, and I believe we must show the leadership by tackling the problem in our backyard and around the world. I thank all of my colleagues who have come to this Chamber in the past to talk about this issue and show their support for dealing with this problem. We must continue to act. I yield the floor.