Foreign Relations Bill
A BILL
To
amend the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 to increase assistance for foreign
countries seriously affected by HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, and for
other purposes.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of
Representatives of the United States of America in Congress
assembled,
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE; TABLE OF
CONTENTS.
(a)
SHORT TITLE- This Act may be cited as the `United States Leadership Against
HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria Act of 2002'.
SEC. 2. FINDINGS.
(1) During the last 20 years, HIV/AIDS
has assumed pandemic proportions, spreading from the most severely affected
region, sub-Saharan Africa , to all corners of the world, and leaving an
unprecedented path of death and devastation.
(2) According to the Joint United Nations
Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), more than 60,000,000 people worldwide have been
infected with HIV since the epidemic began; more than 22,000,000 of these have
lost their lives to the disease; and more than 13,000,000 children have been
orphaned by the disease. HIV/AIDS is the fourth-highest cause of death in the
world.
(3) At the end of 2001, an estimated
40,000,000 people were infected with HIV or living with AIDS. Of these, more
than 2,700,000 were children under the age of fifteen and more than 17,600,000
were women. Women are four times more vulnerable to infection than are men and
are becoming infected at increasingly high rates because in many societies women
lack control over sexual encounters and cannot insist on the use of protective
measures. Women and children who are refugees or are internally displaced
persons are especially vulnerable to sexual violence, thereby increasing the
possibility of HIV infection.
(4) As the leading cause of death in
sub-Saharan Africa , AIDS has killed more than 17,000,000 people (more than 3
times the number of AIDS deaths in the rest of the world) and will claim the
lives of one-quarter of the population, mostly adults, in the next
decade.
(14) Although HIV/AIDS is first and
foremost a health problem, successful strategies to stem the spread of the
pandemic will require not only medical interventions, the strengthening of
health care delivery systems and infrastructure and determined national
leadership and increased budgetary allocations for the health sector in
countries affected by the epidemic but also measures to address the social and
behavioral causes of the problem and its impact on families, communities, and
societal sectors.
(15) Basic interventions to prevent new
HIV infections and to bring care and treatment to people living with AIDS, such
as voluntary counseling and testing and mother-to-child transmission programs,
are achieving meaningful results and are cost-effective. The challenge is to
expand these interventions from a pilot program basis to a national basis in a
coherent and sustainable manner.
(17)
The United States has the capacity to lead and enhance the effectiveness of the
international community's response by--
(A) providing substantial financial
resources, technical expertise, and training, particularly of health care
personnel and community workers and leaders;
(B) promoting vaccine and microbicide
research and the development of new treatment protocols in the public and
commercial pharmaceutical research sectors;
SEC. 4. PURPOSE.
The
purpose of this Act is to strengthen United States leadership and the
effectiveness of the United States response to certain global infectious
diseases by--
(1) establishing a comprehensive,
integrated five-year, global strategy to fight HIV/AIDS that encompasses a plan
for phased expansion of critical programs and improved coordination among
relevant Executive branch agencies and between the United States and foreign
governments and international organizations;
(2) providing increased resources for
multilateral efforts to fight HIV/AIDS;