Political Quotes

“Senator Santorum and I come to the floor today to offer our amendment to increase funding for global AIDS by $566 million, raising the U.S. contribution to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria for fiscal year 2007 to $866 million. This amendment would raise the U.S. contribution to the fight against global AIDS to $4.8 billion in total for bilateral and multilateral programs combined. This money is desperately needed. This year we mark the 25 anniversary of the discovery of AIDS. A generation has been born and come of age since then. Twenty-five years ago, the Centers for Disease Control published what turned out to be one of the first descriptions of acquired immune deficiency syndrome in a short article in a weekly report. That article described five cases of pneumonia. It stated that these five cases ``suggest the possibility of a cellular-immune dysfunction.'' AIDS did not yet have a name, but it had an identity. In the quarter century since those first cases were diagnosed, roughly 70 million people have been infected with HIV. More than 22 million have died. More than 12 million children in Africa alone have been orphaned. Last year, 3 million people died, and 5 million people were newly infected. Every 60 seconds, there are five more deaths from AIDS and nine more infections. Over the next decade, an estimated 50 million more people will contract HIV. Those numbers are devastating.…”