AIDS Bush backs away from oath for AIDS workers

Groups working overseas have to declare an opposition to prostitution.
WASHINGTON POST
WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration pulled back Tuesday from a plan that would have required thousands of grassroots AIDS organizations working overseas and partly funded by U.S. money to publicly declare their opposition to prostitution and sex trafficking.
Overseas AIDS groups that receive money directly from the U.S. government or through a federally funded American charity already have to declare their opposition to prostitution.
The new policy was attempting to extract a similar pledge from the much larger universe of AIDS groups whose funding comes from multinational organizations that collect money from many countries, not just the United States.
Their objections
Many AIDS organizations are highly critical of what they term the anti-prostitution "loyalty oath," arguing it will make it harder to reach a crucial risk group -- prostitutes -- with prevention messages.
A document issued last week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that grassroots AIDS groups receiving money through the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria had to make the declaration even though the Global Fund itself was exempt.
This would have meant that roughly 3,000 groups in 128 countries supported by the Global Fund would have to make the pledge -- something that AIDS activitists said would cause a mixture of fear and resentment in some.
The 4-year-old fund so far has committed $3 billion, a third of it from the United States. Because organizations that don't make the pledge cannot get federal funds, the huge U.S. contribution to the Global Fund might have been at risk if the Fund had balked at enforcing the requirement.
A spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, Kevin Keane, said Tuesday night that the posting of the CDC document was "a misunderstanding." The language "hadn't been fully reviewed and cleared. We are removing that language," he said.