[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 147 (2001), Part 3]
[House]
[Page 3594]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                             COMBATING AIDS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Simpson). Under a previous order of the 
House, the gentlewoman from the District of Columbia (Ms. Norton) is 
recognized for 5 minutes.
  Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, recently drug companies announced that they 
would sell anti-AIDS drugs in southern Africa at a considerable 
discount. This would still entail hundreds of dollars per person. The 
recent experience of Bristol-Myers Squibb gives me caution. A $100 
million, 5-year initiative that was meant to donate money for AIDS 
drugs in Africa has boiled down to almost nothing. The reasons are not 
entirely clear. Although this was to be a charitable gift, the money 
has come down to $1.3 million per year to five participating countries.
  I recall that when Prime Minister Mbeki of South Africa was here for 
a visit last year, we all wondered why Mbeki was embroiled in a 
torturous notion about the cause of AIDS. I wish he had been more 
forthright about what his real problem was, and when he met with the 
Congressional Black Caucus I believe I was able to extract from him 
what his real problem was. South Africa offers free medical care, and 
on cross-examination it became clear that if South Africa were to even 
use the rather inexpensive drugs to combat mother-to-infant 
transmission it would use up its entire medical budget.
  We must not forget that with the great importance we attach to drugs 
and especially the agreement of some of these companies to offer drugs 
at discount rates in southern Africa, that in developing countries 
nothing can replace prevention. In this country, Medicaid is 
overwhelmed with the costs of AIDS, but it is an entitlement, so people 
are going to get it. In developing countries, where there is TB and 
malaria and hundreds of other diseases, to superimpose our notion of 
how to combat the disease is not going to work. I hate to consider it, 
but it is true. It seems to me that it is time to face the importance 
of continuing to stress prevention as the most important strategy not 
only in this country but especially in developing countries.
  Developing countries are being set back decades because of the AIDS 
crisis. To the great credit of some of the companies and others around 
the world, we want drugs to be made available to developing countries 
as well. It will be important to prioritize which drugs to which 
people. Mother-to-children drugs that are especially effective in 
keeping children from getting AIDS at all would be very, very 
important. But, beyond that, we have got to tailor strategies for 
combating AIDS to the environment in which those strategies are 
expected to work.
  In Africa, we greet the decision of the drug companies to offer drugs 
at discount rates. At the same time, we must remind ourselves that most 
of our effort must go into preventing AIDS, which has already become a 
catastrophe of epidemic proportions in southern Africa.

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