Pres Bush asks Congress for $30B PEPFAR funds

President George W Bush has asked the US Congress to provide $30.0 billion for the President's Emergency Program for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). The funding would enable the scheme to deliver treatment for 2.5 million people, an increase of 1.4 million for current levels of support.

The PEPFAR is criticized by many other HIV/AIDS organizations because of the emphasis on abstinence education, which accounts for 7% of the program's budget. Wary of the failure to deliver of many international projects, the US initiative also tends to ignore established groups. Despite these criticisms, Pres Bush's scheme, launched in 2003, has shown itself effective at reaching HIV/AIDS sufferers, with 822,000 people in 15 "target" countries receiving antiretroviral drugs, as well as a further 165,000 people in the rest of the world.

One PEPFAR initiative involves providing a short course of drugs to 500,000 pregnant women, which the program's administrators claim has prevented about 100,000 newborns from contracting the disease, the Wall Street Journal reports. The newspaper also stated that the unexpected timing of Pres Bush's announcement was probably related to other issues. These include anticipated criticism of the Republican administration over climate change at a Group of Eight summit in Germany and problems with the World Bank, where the President Paul Wolfowitz (a political ally of Pres Bush) was forced to resign in a scandal over an alleged staffing conflict of interest.