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We also honor the courage of officials from developing countries in this struggle, including the strong stand of the government of your home country of Nigeria. And President Bush deeply appreciates the support of your great President Obesanjo as, together, we fight the scourge of international terrorism.

Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, our Director-General at the World Health Organization, it is always a pleasure to see you and an honor to be sharing this hour with you. Thank you again for your assistance and the hard work of your staff in helping to set up the Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

Dr. Richard Feachem, what a pleasure it has been to get to know you. I look forward to working with you closely on the Global Fund.

And I want to thank the organizing committee and the International AIDS Society for extending the invitation to speak this afternoon.

We at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services have provided strong financial, operational, intellectual and moral support to this and previous AIDS conferences, and are again proud to be your partners.

We are here because HIV/AIDS is one of the most serious challenges facing humanity. No country has been spared. Some have faced widespread devastation. All have citizens whose lives have been destroyed by this horrible disease.

We estimate that roughly half the persons living with HIV in the United States are either unaware of their infection or not in care.

We know that in some of the hardest-hit countries that figure is closer to 95 percent. We are only at the beginning of this crisis, and we do not yet know its true dimensions.

One statistic particularly underscores the gravity of the crisis: by 2010, an estimated 44 million children around the world will have lost one or both parents to AIDS. That's almost too painful to contemplate.

The depth and breadth of that tragedy - of that indescribable pain - was brought home to me in April when I led a delegation of our nation's elected officials, scientists, NGOs, and others to four African nations.

While in South Africa, we visited an orphanage where all the children wanted was to be picked up and hugged. It was heart wrenching - and never was it more clear that we as a nation, we as a global community, must do more. It is a social, moral and political obligation - one that we in the United States will not ignore.

Just how serious is this problem? Since the beginning of the pandemic, an estimated 5.1 million children worldwide have been infected, almost all through mother-to-child transmission, and an estimated 4 million have died.

That is why I asked Tony Fauci, the remarkable leader of our AIDS research efforts at the National Institutes of Health, and the great team at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to come up with a plan to help children - and their mothers - in Sub-Saharan Africa where entire generations of families have been ravaged by this insidious disease.

Tony and his team of scientists went to work and came up with the Mother and Child Transmission Prevention Initiative, which the President wholeheartedly and enthusiastically endorsed before announcing it last month.

This bold and visionary initiative will provide more than $500 million over the next 18 months to prevent the transmission of HIV/AIDS from mothers to infants and to improve the health care delivery systems in 12 African nations and the Caribbean.

As part of the initiative, we will be building on our domestic expertise by pairing U.S. hospitals and clinics with their African and Caribbean counterparts, facilitating the training of personnel and implementation of prevention, care and treatment programs.

Through a combination of prevention, improving care and drug treatment and building the health care delivery capacity, by its fifth year this effort is expected to reach over six million women and treat almost one million women. It aims to reduce mother-to-child transmission by 40 percent within five years or less in twelve African countries and the Caribbean.

Speaking of politics, some have found it easy and popular to criticize the United States for not doing enough to fight the spread of HIV/AIDS.

I would like to speak about that for a moment. As you know, this is a new administration - we're about 18 months in - and with it has come a new and unprecedented commitment to this cause. Consider:

Overall HIV/AIDS spending by the U.S. government has increased from $14.2 billion in fiscal year 2001 to well over $16 billion for fiscal year 2003.

That includes a doubling in international HIV/AIDS funding over the same period. Let me repeat that: we have doubled international funding in just 18 months.

We have made an unprecedented commitment to prevention programs, both at home and abroad.

This administration is devoted to finding a cure and an effective vaccine and therefore has allocated unprecedented resources to the National Institutes of Health, the unquestioned leader in biomedical research. The NIH budget request for fiscal year 2003 includes $2.8 billion for HIV research - a more than $500 million increase over 2001.

Simply put, no administration in any nation has ever made fighting HIV/AIDS as high a priority as the United States under this administration.

This commitment was shown as never before last spring, when President Bush stepped into the White House Rose Garden and announced the United States was pledging $200 million to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria - a commitment that was made before the Fund had even been created.

Since then, the U.S. commitment has grown to $500 million - far more than any other nation. In fact, the United States has made a quarter of the Fund's pledges and is the only nation to make a second pledge.

But the United States cannot do it alone. I urge all other nations - particularly European nations - to recommit themselves to the Fund, just as we have.

The Global Fund is vital, the Global Fund is sustainable, and the Global Fund - coupled with so many other efforts by so many dedicated people such as yourselves - will work, but only if we remain committed to it.

We must have the political will and encourage it in others to make this fight a priority. The millions of people we have lost to this disease - and their loved ones - deserve nothing less.

The United States is mindful that investing in global health is not only a matter of increasing economic growth or improving political stability. It will help us do nothing less than save the next generation. There can be few higher callings for all of us as a civilized society.

Let me reiterate: the United States will continue to provide unmatched money, expertise and research to the battle against HIV/AIDS.

Today, I pledge to you: the fight against HIV/AIDS has no greater ally than United States under President Bush. Therefore, it is time we all work together as partners to end this terrible scourge that is tearing apart families, communities and, yes, even countries.

This is not a fight we will abandon. This is a fight we will lead. But it is not a fight that we alone can win.

Thank you very much.