Political Quotes

“today I rise to introduce, along with my distinguished colleague from Wisconsin, Mr. Feingold, the Mother-to-child HIV Prevention Act, a bill that seeks to address mother-to-child transmission of HIV in developing regions of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. According to the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), nearly 4.5 million children below the age of 15 years have been infected with HIV since the AIDS epidemic began. More than 3 million have already died of AIDS. Children are becoming infected at the rate of nearly one child every minute, and the overwhelming majority of these children acquired the infection from their mothers. In July 1999, the National Institutes of Health released a report on the effectiveness of a drug called nevirapine (NVP) in preventing mother-to-child transmission of HIV. NVP is given just once to the mother during labor and once to the baby within three days after birth. It costs $4 per tablet. The discovery of this relatively simple and inexpensive drug regimen--along with others like it--has created an unprecedented opportunity for international cooperation in the fight against the vertical transmission of HIV. USAID is currently engaged in four of the eleven vertical transmission pilot projects in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. These studies will be completed within the year, at which point the intervention programs can undergo a significant increase in scale. But additional funding is needed.…”