Obama breaks campaign promise on AIDS

U.S. President Barack Obama's failure to lift a federal funding ban on syringe exchange -- a policy that allows intravenous drug users to swap used needles for clean ones -- is a blow to AIDS-prevention efforts, says a global health group. Although Obama pledged on the campaign trail to overturn the federal ban on funding for syringe exchange, he refrained from doing so in his proposed 2010 budget. "Providing clean syringes is proven to be one of the most effective public health interventions since the polio vaccine," said Jennifer Flynn, managing director of Health Global Access Project (GAP). "It is clear that it works, but yet, we now have to wait for Congress to act to have the freedom to use every possible resource to make it widely available." Overall, U.S. health advocates were extremely disappointed by the health provisions in the president's 2010 budget, unveiled yesterday. "Our analysis of the information provided by the White House today show that the president's FY10 global health budget essentially flat-lines support for global health and ignores the president's campaign promises to fully fund PEPFAR (the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) and to provide a fair-share contribution to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB [tuberculosis], and Malaria," said Paul Zeitz, executive director of the Global AIDS Alliance. "This proposal is even worse than we had feared," added Christine Lubinski, director of the Center for Global Health Policy. "With this spending request, Obama has broken his campaign promise to provide 1 billion dollars a year in new money for global AIDS, and he has overlooked the growing threat of tuberculosis." Just after Obama's election, AIDS activists spoke of high hopes for a renewed U.S. commitment to fighting the disease. Last month, however, a U.S. health care foundation said Obama's first official plan to fight domestic HIV/AIDS "falls far short" of what is needed to confront the growing epidemic. The $45 million media campaign, launched in early April, aims to raise awareness about domestic HIV/AIDS over the next five years. "If this proposal is any indication of how President Obama and his Administration intend to address the AIDS epidemic domestically or globally, we are deeply disappointed," said Michael Weinstein, president of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation.