Remarks by Mrs. Laura Bush at the International AIDS Conference in Washington, D.C.

Thanks to everyone here. I’m very happy to be with you today at this conference. I’m glad you that are meeting in our beautiful capitol city and I hope you enjoyed our time in Washington. And I’m especially glad to be with you to mark the progress that’s been made and to look ford an even greater response to HIV/AIDS.

Thank you, Helene, you’re the perfect moderator for a session on leadership in the AIDS response to women, thank you for your leadership of CARE and thank you for CARE’s lifesaving work. We’ve just heard from a leader that I admire very much, Aung San Suu Kyi, from Burma. Her courage and persistence is an example to women and men worldwide.

When I thought about what I wanted to say about women in today’s session, I thought of the many women, some of whom I know, and some of whom I’ll never know, who came before us and who led us in our response to a pandemic disease. I thought of my own mother-in-law, Barbara Bush, while my father-in-law was president during those early days when people thought you could catch AIDS from touching somebody.

Barbara Bush cradled HIV-positive babies and hugged people with AIDS. She met with families who lost loved ones to AIDS and she visited the AIDS memorial that was on the Mall then like it is now. Her graceful example challenged all Americans to confront HIV/AIDS with care and compassion rather than fear and judgment.

When you look around the world, you see that women are in the forefront of life changing progress. In Afghanistan, under the Taliban, women ran underground literacy centers risking their own lives to teach women and girls to read. In Burma, despite years of oppression, women remain steadfast in their dissent, inspiring the world with their grace and courage in the face of brutality. Women have been central in the fight against AIDS, a disease that one newspaper compared to the Black Death of the Middle Ages, a global horror.

Ten years ago, HIV/AIDS raged out of control. Worldwide, more than 22 million men, women and children had died from AIDs and 15,000 people were infected every day. In 2002, experts estimated that the AIDS pandemic could double in the next five years to 80 million people infected with the virus. Health professional and leaders around the world knew that dramatic action was necessary to address this crisis. In June 2002, my husband, President Bush, spoke to a crowd in the Rose Garden. He said, “The global devastation of HIV/AIDS staggers the imagination and shocks the conscience.”

That day he announced a $500 million initiative to combat AIDs by treating HIV infected women with antiretroviral drugs to stop transmissions of the virus between mothers and their babies. Six months later in his 2003 State of the Union address, President Bush announced the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the largest international health initiative ever directed at a single disease. [Applause].

Members of Congress stood solidly with President Bush and thunderous applause echoed throughout the U.S. Capital when he announced this historic commitment. Sitting with me in the gallery of the capital that evening was a Ugandan doctor who helped President Bush’s senior advisors develop PEPFAR.

Dr. Peter Mujenyi’s smile radiated relief and joy. As a medical professional in one of the country’s hardest hit by this deadly disease, he knew the toll of AIDS. Dr. Mujenyi remembered the faces of the patients he could have saved if he’d had medicine and on a cold January evening, thousands of miles from his home, he knew that the outcome would be different for future patients.

PEPFAR has committed over $15 billion over five years

to prevent new infections, to treat those already infected with

AIDS and to care for children orphaned by parents who had died

of AIDS. In a pediatric clinic in Botswana that year,

President Bush and I saw firsthand the devastating toll of

AIDS.

In that pediatric clinic, my daughter, Barbara and I met a mother who had brought her little girl for treatment. She dressed her little girl like an angel in a lovely lavender and white dress, to meet the American president. This precious little child lay on an examining table so frail and sick, her mother’s last hope was to make her beautiful.

Today with access to antiretrovirals, that little girl would have another chance at life. In fact, three weeks ago, we’ve returned to Botswana. We saw that same pediatric clinic and it now has so few patients that they’re looking for a new use for the facility. [Applause].

Barbara, our daughter, was so affected by this beautiful child that she resolved then to help confront the challenges this little girl faced. Today Barbara leads Global Health Corps in an effort to recruit young, smart college graduates to work in the health field in underserved areas.

While George was President, I traveled to Africa five times and George and I have returned there together two times since leaving Washington. On each visit, I saw the consequences of AIDS. Widowed women left to find jobs and care for their family. Orphaned children forced to grow up quickly and provide for themselves and their younger siblings and I’ve seen what many call the Lazarus Effect. AIDS patients returning from death’s door and living a vibrant life. [Applause].

Rather than waiting quietly for death, millions who suffer from HIV are now working and participating in their communities. Zambia in 2007, my daughter Jenna and I toured a center founded by a woman whose husband had died from AIDS. The Mututu Centre provides homecare for more than 150 IADS patients in Zambia.

The center offers support groups for female victims of violence and promotes HIV prevention campaigns for young people, so Zambia’s next generation will be HIV free. Jenna and I helped packed medicines, mosquito nets, baby dolls and toiletries in the baskets of these caregivers’ bicycles so they could ride out into the local community to provide home based care for their patients.

Later we sat in the brilliant sunshine listening to stories of those being helped at the Mututu Centre. Two girls wept as they told us how they had contracted AIDS through sexual violence. Afterwards Jenna walked over to hug them and to tell them that they weren’t alone and that she was writing a book, called Anna’s Story, about a girl she had met in Central America who had suffered as they had and they said to her, “Oh, write about us! Tell our story!”

Just by revealing their tragic past, these young women are building a hopeful future for the next generation. I heard stories in every one of the 12 PEPFAR countries I visited during George’s eight years in office. From Africa to Asia to the Americas, in rural villages, in capital cities, women led efforts to confront HIV, women starting their own businesses to provide for themselves and their families.

Mothers teaching mothers to prevent the spread of HIV to their unborn children and women in leadership using their influence to reduce the stigma associated with HIV and to raise awareness for testing and treatment. We know that education, especially for girls is vital for efforts to stop the spread of HIV, educated girls have lower rates of HIV, they have healthier families and they have higher rates of education for their own children.

Last December, President Bush and I traveled with Barbara and Jenna and Jenna’s husband Henry to Tanzania, Zambia and Ethiopia. We met a woman whose husband was HIV positive but she didn’t know it until she contracted the disease. When he died, she was shunned by her own family, while they allowed her to stay with them, she wasn’t allowed to sit with them or to eat with them.

They even gave her her own plate and utensils out of the mistaken belief that they could catch AIDS from her. Then she was introduced to a faith based organization called Chicken Buso that provided education and training for widows and orphans. Chicken Buso, which means remembrance, taught her beautiful purses, a few of which we bought out of recycled materials so she could support herself and her children.

As her finances improved, she moved out on her own with her children and now she supports the family that once shunned her [applause] extending to them the grace that she received through Chicken Buso.

Her story is a powerful testament to why we must do more to promote the good health of women everywhere. The health of women affects families, communities and whole countries.

Healthy mothers make healthy families. When a mother dies, her children are up to ten times more likely to die themselves and are less likely to ever go to school. We’ve seen the benefits of strong partnerships to fight AIDS. Nearly 7 million people are living with HIV now because of access to antiretroviral therapy and new HIV infections have fallen by nearly 20 percent.

The success of PEPFAR has given us a proven strategy and the resources to confront other health challenges. We added efforts to prevent malaria through the President’s Malaria Initiative and now because we’re seeing women living with AIDS, but dying from cervical cancer, the Bush Institute has launched the Pink Ribbon Red Ribbon. Last Fall at the Bush Institute’s Global Health Summit in Washington D.C., President Bush announced the Institute’s new partnership. The Bush Institute is partnering on Pink Ribbon Red Ribbon with the United States State Department and PEPFAR with UNAIDS and Susan G. Komen for the Cure to screen and treat breast and cervical cancer among women in the developing world.

I’m so pleased that our partners, Secretary Michel Sidibe who runs UNAIDS and my good friend, Nancy Brinker, from the Komen Foundation for the Cure, are here with us today. Thank you all for joining us. [Applause].

We’re also happy to have several private sector partners who are supporting this initiative, Becton Dickinson, Bristol-Myers Squibb, the Caris Foundation, GlaxoSmithKline, IBM, Merck, Kyogen, Airborne Lifeline and the National Breast Cancer Foundation. Cervical Cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in sub-Saharan Africa and it’s a preventable and treatable disease. It’s up to five times more common in women whose immune systems are already compromised with HIV.

The Pink Ribbon Red Ribbon Initiative will be revealed on the PEPFAR platform to screen and treat women for breast and cervical cancer. George and I launched the Pink Ribbon Red Ribbon in Zambia last December. When we just returned to Zambia earlier this month, President Bush and I were thrilled to see their progress.

Pink Ribbon Red Ribbon has expanded beyond the capital city of Lusaka and across the country. Multiple clinics are now screening, diagnosing and treating women for cervical cancer. Already more than 14,000 women have been screened.

Nearly 40-percent of those women are HIV positive and nearly one third of all the women screened tested positive for pre-cancerous or cancerous cervical cells and of those who tested positive, more than 80-percent could be treated immediately with cryotherapy. [Applause].

Zambia’s first lady, Christine Kaseba, is a doctor in obstetrics and gynecology and she is a champion for Pink Ribbon Red Ribbon effort throughout her country. Since her husband became president of Zambia last fall, she’s worked to focus national attention on maternal health and mortality. Earlier this week, Dr. Kaseba hosted a conference for African first ladies to discus AIDS and cervical cancer. Dr. Kaseba’s strong leadership is setting the example for African first ladies and for women everywhere. [Applause].

In our fight against AIDS, we’ve learned that any measure of success, requires sustained leadership at every level from international organizations like UNAIDS to political leaders in each nation and from ministries of health to local community health workers. That’s why I’m so grateful to everyone in this audience today, for your courage, for your persistence, you are the proven agents of change around the world.

By working together, we can give hope to mothers and fathers, to sisters and brothers, to wives and husbands and sons and daughters, so that they and their families can live full and productive lives. Thank you all very, very much.