The Bush administration and some members of Congress appear to be playing a nasty game of political football with AIDS and global health issues. In recent days, the administration has radically reduced the number of government scientists who will be permitted to attend the biennial International AIDS Conference, slashed its support for the event and its funding for an annual meeting of the Global Health Council. The reason? Aid and comfort for the policies of the religious right.
Advertisement
This Nasty Game Is Scored in Lives
The religious right has conspired to cut federal funding to AIDS conference.
Commentary
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Wednesday June 02, 2004 Home Edition California Part B Page 13 Editorial Pages Desk 0 inches; 20 words Type of Material: Correction
Namibia -- In an Op-Ed article Sunday on AIDS, the name of the African country Namibia was misspelled as Nambia.
Advertisement
Last month Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson announced that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health would send just 50 delegates to the 2004 International AIDS Conference in Bangkok, the preeminent scientific gathering on HIV research and treatment. The last gathering, in Barcelona in 2002, included 236 American government scientists.
In addition, Health and Human Services hacked its general funding for the AIDS conference from $3.6 million to less than half a million. The big losers will be scientists and physicians from Africa and other regions hit hard by AIDS, who typically attend the conference on fellowships largely underwritten by the U.S. government.
As U.S. cancellations pour in, many of the satellite sessions -- separate meetings in Bangkok on specific research topics -- have been forced to cancel or reorganize because key participants will be unable to attend.
What is lost? Consider one small example: Scientists from desperately poor countries, such as Zimbabwe, Nambia and Kenya, where more than 20% of the populations are HIV-infected, need critical skills in grant-writing, data collection and health-cost monitoring. Typically, American government scientists and officials teach those skills in satellite sessions at the conference. But not this year.
Similarly, the Global Health Council will hold its annual convention, in Washington on Thursday, without funding from the U.S. government, a first in the council's 31-year history. The conference lost a third of its budget when the Bush administration pulled the plug in April.
A Washington Times editorial on April 23 sparked the cuts, calling the Global Health convention a "reproductive rights" gathering that "expressly opposed the Bush administration's agenda on sexual-health issues."
