Increased funding for global diseases

Cool heads prevailed in the U.S. Senate and an emergency AIDS relief plan is back on track.

Congress boosted the President's Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief, known as PEPFAR, to $48 billion, tripling current funding. This is good. The AIDS-relief plan offers the strongest and most compassionate response of developed nations to the battle against AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis.

It also represents bipartisanship at its best. President Bush in 2003 launched the original $15 billion, five-year commitment to battle the diseases globally. At that time, only 50,000 people in all of sub-Saharan African were receiving antiretroviral drugs. Today, that figure is 1.7 million.

Another 7 million, including about 2.7 million AIDS orphans and other vulnerable children, are receiving other kinds of care.

Then ideology got in the way.

The legislation that passed the Senate 80-16 this week spent months tied up in ideological wrangling. The Senate's Democratic leadership and President Bush were in one corner, Senate conservatives in another. Painstaking negotiations were required to resolve whether or not the relief plan would continue to include programs promoting abstinence and marital fidelity and ensuring that religious groups would be among those eligible for the funds. A Republican-led effort to reduce PEPFAR's spending levels was rebuffed.

Two key portions that survived the ideological battles were the lifting of a travel ban on those who are HIV positive and want to come to the United States; and an initiative to attack the global-health-care-worker shortage.

The latter represents a goal to hire and train 140,000 new health-care professionals and paraprofessionals — the largest commitment of any nation.