[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 148 (2002), Part 9]
[House]
[Pages 12609-12610]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                         U.S. ROLE IN HIV-AIDS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Washington (Mr. McDermott) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate my colleague, the 
gentlewoman from California (Ms. Lee) for bringing this issue and for 
taking the time to take the trip to Barcelona and go to the conference.
  One of the striking things this morning was looking at the newspaper 
clips and finding that the Secretary of Health and Human Services of 
the United States of America was booed off the stage. When you look at 
that, you ask yourself, why is it that we, the strongest, the most 
wealthy, the most advanced, the most scientifically creative country in 
the world is booed off the stage of an international conference on a 
world plague?
  I think that it is important for us to think about what role we in 
this country have played. We have not taken our rightful leadership. 
There has not been an international conference in the United States 
since this Congress passed the Helms-Burton amendment some years ago, 
which excluded from this country anybody who has AIDS. If you have 
AIDS, you are not supposed to be able to get into this country.
  Now, the statement we made to the world with that particular 
amendment from this Congress was that somehow coming in here you are 
bringing something that is not already here. AIDS is in this country. 
As we have already heard from previous speakers, like my friend from 
North Carolina, it is the leading cause of death among young black men 
in this country, and it is a leading illness among Hispanic women in 
this country.
  We in this country have a problem that we have not dealt with. This 
Congress has not put money into the kind of prevention and education 
programs that we ought to be doing for young people in this country. 
But that statement of the Helms-Burton amendment

[[Page 12610]]

said to the world, you have got the problem, do not bring it over here. 
Clearly, this was not looking at our own position.
  Now, the reason that conference in Barcelona was so important is that 
it is starting to talk about more and more advances of treatment and 
more and more complicated illnesses being found. There is all kinds of 
research there, but one must not lose sight of the fact that education 
and prevention still are the best hope for the world. We can have 
retroviral therapy, and we want that, and we should push the drug 
companies, and we should do everything possible, but administering 
those drugs and monitoring them, and it is as somebody described it, 
savage therapy. It is tough treatment. It is not an easy regimen. It 
has only so much effectiveness.
  The real thing we have to get is people educated and aware of their 
own status. That is not expensive. If we would spend the money for the 
diagnostic tools that we have available and developed in this United 
States by USAID, we could make it possible for everyone to know their 
status. So at least they would know whether or not they were passing it 
on to their partner. But we do not put our money where our mouth is.
  We say we want to do things for the world. We go and we make 
speeches, we put up a little bit of money, and then we double-count it 
so it looks like more. But the fact is, the United States is not 
putting up their fair share. Kofi Annan asked for an enormous 
contribution, said how much would be necessary, and the United States 
put up a pitiful amount.
  Our contribution is something like 0.1 percent of our gross domestic 
product. The Norwegians, the Swedes, the Danes, the Dutch put up 0.2, 
0.3 percent. Why can these little countries do that and we, the country 
with all the resources in the world, not put the money into the Global 
AIDS Fund that Kofi Annan has set up, or through our USAID? Or there 
are many ways in which we could put that money out there, but it 
requires a commitment.
  Now, thanks to the work of people like the gentlewoman from 
California (Ms. Lee) and the gentlewoman from California (Ms. 
Millender-McDonald) and other Members of the Congress, the devastation 
that is occurring in Africa is now much better understood than it was 
10 years ago.
  I remember in 1991 having lunch with the President of Zambia, Mr. 
Kaunda, who said, what will I do with 500,000 orphans? Today, we are 
dealing with those orphans worldwide. And if we do not do something 
about it, it will not be 500,000, it will be millions and millions and 
millions of orphans. We must do more.

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