Cord Byrd: “This January, in his State of the Union Address, President Bush announced a 5-year, $15 billion global AIDS initiative.…”

“This January, in his State of the Union Address, President Bush announced a 5-year, $15 billion global AIDS initiative. The President received a lot of praise for that announcement, as he should have. AIDS is a dreadful disease which is currently inflicting an almost unimaginable toll on the African continent, devastating entire populations. Sub-Saharan Africa has been far more severely affected by AIDS than any other part of the world. According to UNAIDS--the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS--in 2002, there were 29.4 million people living with HIV and AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. Africa has about 10 percent of the world's population but more than 70 percent of the worldwide total of infected people. In fact, the infection rate among adults is about 8.8 percent in Africa, compared with 1.2 percent worldwide. More than 17 million Africans have died from AIDS since its emergence, and UNAIDS estimates that by 2020, an additional 55 million Africans will lose their lives to the epidemic. The sheer brutality of these statistics is hard to fathom and must tug at the hearts and souls of all of us in this body.”