US Religious Groups Call for Increased AIDS Funds

[Guest guest]

Friday November 30 5:23 PM ET

US Religious Groups Call for Increased AIDS Funds

By Alan Mozes

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - On the eve of World AIDS (news - web sites) Day,

a coalition of American religious organizations are labeling the AIDS

pandemic ``the greatest humanitarian crisis of our time.''

The leadership of these faith-based groups gathered this morning in Florida,

Seattle, and New York for a telephone press conference to issue a call for

dramatic increases in US funding of prevention and treatment efforts in

those regions--particularly Africa--that are hardest hit.

``The fact is that churches, non-governmental organizations (NGO) and

African governments can't do the job alone,'' said Bishop H. Ricard.

Ricard is the bishop of Pensacola/Tallahasee and president of Catholic

Relief Services, which has been subsidizing AIDS projects involving over 2

million people in 80 countries since 1989.

``The crisis of AIDS is so vast that massive resources are needed,'' Ricard

said. ``It's a tragedy that cannot wait...(and) the resources to combat AIDS

pledged so far by wealthy nations is seriously insufficient.''

Ricard noted that present estimates put the number of African men and women

infected with AIDS at 23 million, the number currently dying at 505,000 and

the number of new cases each day at 11,000. He suggested that the US has

fallen far short of its financial obligations to the recently established

United Nations (news - web sites) Global Health Fund for AIDS.

The fund has recommended that at least $7 to $10 billion in public and

private funds be raised per year for prevention and treatment, 25% of which

is expected to come from US sources. To date, the US government has

committed $100 million to the fund out of a total $300 million pledge.

``We are calling on the US Congress for $1 billion in emergency supplemental

funding...to get the prevention and treatment that we know can literally

save millions of lives,'' said Dr. Joanne , legislative director of

RESULTS, a grass-roots organization dedicated to humanitarian and AIDS

advocacy work.

``Much has been written around the statistics on HIV (news - web sites),''

said Stearns, president of World Vision, the world's largest

Christian international relief and development agency. ``(But) if we were to

have a list of all 12 million orphans, that stack of paper would literally

be 90 stories tall,'' he added, making a parallel to the height of the World

Trade Center towers destroyed in the September 11th terrorist attack in New

York.

Stearns observed that an estimated 7 out of 10 Americans had made a

charitable donation in the aftermath of September 11th. Yet he said a survey

recently completed by his organization found 61% of Americans would be

unlikely to help with AIDS prevention and care programs in Africa.

``I believe that this could very well be looked at by historians in the

future as the sin of our generation,'' he said. ``I believe our children and

their children are going to ask me what did you do while 40 million children

became orphaned in Africa?''

Both Ricard and Stearns told Reuters Health that religious groups are

well-placed to highlight this moral failure, viewing the problem as a

combined result of American isolationism, racism and the inclination to

blame those affected by stigmatizing their behavior.

``Unfortunately many people still see the AIDS epidemic as a moral

degeneracy,'' said Ricard. ``(But) this is a disease that needs the

attention and the compassion of the American people.''