This Nasty Game Is Scored in Lives

The religious right has conspired to cut federal funding
to AIDS conference.

By Laurie Garrett

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-garrett30may30,1,709759.story

Laurie Garrett, a Pulitzer Prize-winning health
reporter, is now a senior fellow at the Council on
Foreign Relations.

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. FOR
THE RECORD: Namibia -In an Op-Ed article Sunday on AIDS,
the name of the African country Namibia was misspelled
as Nambia. 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."

The convention’s theme, "Youth and Health: Generation on
the Edge," prompted the organizers to include sessions
on sex education, birth control and drugs - issues that
the council’s President Dr. Nils Daulaire acknowledges
are "sensitive, controversial and emotionally charged."

Among the scheduled speakers targeted by conservative
opponents of the conference are representatives of
Planned Parenthood, the U.N. International Family
Planning Fund, MTV and MoveOn.org - groups that the
Traditional Values Coalition, the Eagle Forum and other
right-to-life groups see as promoting birth control and
abortion.

Programs like the council’s may "not reflect the
administration’s policies" (to use the words of the
Traditional Values Coalition’s Angela Lafferty), but
targeting the AIDS conference seems to fly directly in
the face of Bush’s own pronouncements.

"God has called us into action" in a war against AIDS,
Bush has said in justifying his $15-billion AIDS
initiative. So why radically reduce the effectiveness of
the international scientific meeting that focuses on
that war?

Perhaps part of the reason is that Thompson didn’t like
the heat generated at the conference in Barcelona by
AIDS activists. Many think that the U.S. doesn’t do
enough, and loud jeers drowned out Thompson’s speech in
2002. But there is also evidence that, as with the
Global Health Council, the AIDS-meeting cuts reflect the
agenda of the religious right.

A team of Republican members of Congress, led by
Indiana’s Rep. Mark E. Souder, charged in a recent
letter to conference organizers that the 2002 AIDS
gathering in Barcelona had 777 presentations that
mentioned condoms, "compared to 16 for ’faithfulness’ or
’fidelity’ and 74 for ’abstinence.’ " The Republican
letter also brought up the "fact" that it was sexual
abstinence and marital faithfulness that had led to a
dramatic reduction in AIDS cases in Uganda. These
critics also expressed shock that no representative of
the Vatican was invited to give a keynote address to the
Barcelona meeting.

Souder and his colleagues used their calculations to
push for changes in the Bangkok agenda. They wanted
faith-based approaches to get more-equal billing. They
didn’t seem to know that there were already five
sessions scheduled to address the roles that religious
organizations play in the war on AIDS.

And as for how the science from Uganda should be
understood, even members of President Bush’s Advisory
Council on HIV and AIDS have agreed that the reduction
in HIV infections there is actually the result of a
complex education program. Promotion of sexual
abstinence and faithfulness were among its elements, but
so was condom use - and relentless public promotion of
safe sex by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni.

It is intolerable to undermine American support of
international health meetings for the purpose of
promoting a narrow American agenda. With more than 70
million people living with HIV today, and with every new
generation of adolescents in particular peril, the
United States has an obligation to address teen health
education, to make common cause with the world’s
scientists and to fund and fight the war for treatment,
prevention and a cure for AIDS.