Dear Colleague:

We are writing to ask you to join us and lend your name to this letter in support of PEPFAR funding for the next fiscal year.  Key congressional funding committees are poised to make funding decisions about PEPFAR and other global health programs and the budget challenges have never been greater. Despite the tremendous opportunities to save lives and reduce HIV incidence, PEPFAR is already at its lowest funding level in years and could face further reductions if Congress is not persuaded that there is a vibrant domestic constituency in support of PEPFAR funding.  As physician scientists who have been engaged in groundbreaking HIV research and who are committed to PEPFAR's mission, we can make a difference.

Please lend your name and affiliation to this letter today by clicking here and filling out the fields, and share this letter with your colleagues by forwarding this email.  We want as many signers as possible. The deadline is Monday, June 3-Noon Eastern time.

Best Wishes,

Kenneth Mayer, MD, FIDSA Co-Chair IDSA Center for Global Health Policy Scientific Advisory Committee

Carol Dukes Hamilton, MD, FIDSA Co-Chair IDSA Center for Global Health Policy Scientific Advisory Committee

 

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The Honorable Barbara Mikulski Chair, Senate Appropriations Committee	The Honorable Harold Rogers Chairman, House Appropriations Committee
The Honorable Richard Shelby Ranking Member, Senate Appropriations Committee	The Honorable Nita Lowey, Ranking Member House Appropriations Committee, House State Foreign Operations Subcommittee
The Honorable Patrick Leahy, Chairman Senate State Foreign Operations Approps	The Honorable Kay Granger, Chair, House State Foreign Operations Subcommittee
The Honorable Lindsey Graham Senate State Foreign Operations Subcommittee

Dear:

We are writing to you one week following the 10th anniversary of the day the President's Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) was signed into law to celebrate the accomplishments of this flagship global health program and to urge you to continue to provide the resources that will allow it to complete its mission.

PEPFAR has saved the lives of millions, while preserving families, communities and even nations that were crippled by the scourge of AIDS. From the beginning, PEPFAR has focused on outcomes: in lives saved, infections averted and orphans rescued from abandonment and despair. PEPFAR has built health workforces, developed laboratory capacities and strengthened health systems with the technical support and resources it has provided, readying countries to respond to all of their health needs. A number of the hardest hit countries in southern and eastern Africa are now approaching a "tipping point" in their epidemics as the number of individuals newly placed at treatment promises to exceed the number of individuals newly infected with HIV in a given year. The Institute of Medicine recently called PEPFAR a "transformative" global health program, and it has consistently engendered bipartisan political support and fostered good will around the world. Now, however, we fear that the global AIDS response embodied in PEPFAR is threatened by a retreat in spending just as science has confirmed a set of potent interventions that, if effectively and rapidly deployed, could stop the AIDS epidemic in its tracks. While we appreciate the budget challenges that you face, stepping back from PEPFAR now will squander the investment we have already made, while putting the lives of millions of men, women and children at risk and ensuring suffering and certain death for many.

As physicians, scientists and educators, we have marveled at the rapid pace of scientific developments to respond to the greatest infectious disease threat of our time. It is rare in the field of medicine for a recently emerged infection to be transformed from an untreatable condition to a manageable disease in less than two decades. Moreover, the recent scientific findings confirming that providing antiretroviral therapy reduces the risk of transmission of the virus by 96 percent have offered the promise of not only saving the lives of those who are already infected, but of dramatically reducing the numbers of new infections at the community and country levels. Much of this powerful scientific knowledge and the tools it has produced in the form of drugs and diagnostics is the result of American leadership, resources and education-a reality of which we can all be proud. But this impressive body of knowledge-from clinical trials that have proven that antiretroviral drugs used during pregnancy can stop transmission to newborns and that HIV treatment significantly reduces the risk of tuberculosis in HIV-infected individuals - is only meaningful if it is deployed to save lives.

The progress we have made is fragile and the lives of millions are still at risk. AIDS remains the leading cause of death among women aged 15-49 worldwide and is the second leading cause of death among men in this age group. It is estimated that one-quarter of deaths in pregnancy is due to AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. At least seven million people in poor countries who urgently need HIV treatment are not yet receiving it, and millions more will be eligible when the World Health Organization releases new clinical guidelines this summer.

The PEPFAR Blueprint: Creating an AIDS-Free Generation, released by former Secretary Clinton last year, documents the progress that has been made and the way forward to changing the trajectory of the AIDS epidemic. Together, the PEPFAR program, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and affected countries can defeat AIDS. We implore you to continue the U.S. leadership that has made an AIDS-free generation an achievable goal in our lifetimes.