URANGA, KENYA — This western Kenya village was slowly dying five years ago.
One in three people was HIV-positive, then a virtual death sentence. Coffin-makers couldn't work fast enough and the nearby hospital overflowed with HIV patients. No family went untouched, but stigma was so severe that few got tested and the word AIDS was rarely uttered.
Today, with an influx of U.S.-funded antiretroviral drugs, prevalence rates have dropped to single digits. The AIDS ward has shut down. And for the first time, people who once spent their days waiting to die are living openly and actively with the disease.
"The drugs restored my hope," said Conslate Otieno, 30, a homemaker and mother in Uranga, near the Kenyan city of Kisumu. After losing her infant to AIDS in 2004 and learning she was HIV-positive, Otieno feared she would not have more children. But with drugs to keep her disease in check, she and her husband, who is also HIV-positive, had two more children, both HIV-negative.
"And I don't worry that I won't be around to take care of her," Otieno said, cradling her 4-month-old baby, Josephine.
The turnaround in Uranga and hundreds of other African villages is due largely to the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, known as Pepfar. Launched by the Bush administration in 2003, the program has pumped $18 billion into treatment and prevention of AIDS in the developing world, mostly in Africa.
President Bush is to leave tonight for a six-day African tour that analysts say will serve as a "victory lap" to highlight U.S. efforts to alleviate AIDS and malaria.
Though some have questioned the spending of billions of dollars to fight AIDS abroad or objected to Pepfar's mandatory emphasis on abstinence, the program's delivery of sorely needed AIDS drugs to people who previously had no hope of affording them is so widely supported that it has drawn praise for Bush from such unlikely backers as rock star Bono.
"This will rank in the top tier of his legacy issues," said J. Stephen Morrison, executive director of the HIV/AIDS Task Force at Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.
Since the program's launch, the number of sub-Saharan Africans receiving AIDS drugs skyrocketed from 50,000 to 1.4 million. In Kenya alone, Pepfar is credited with saving more than 57,000 lives.
