President Barack Obama is renewing the US commitment to ending HIV and AIDS on Thursday, setting goals for getting more people access to life-saving AIDS drugs and boosting spending on treatment of the virus in the US by $50 million dollars. Senior Obama administration officials said the president will set a goal of getting antiretroviral drugs to 2 million more people around the world by the end of 2013. In addition, the US will aim to get the drugs to 1.5 million HIV-positive pregnant women to prevent them from passing the virus to their children. Obama will announce the new initiatives at an event in Washington marking World AIDS Day. Former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton will also speak at the event via satellite. The new global goals build on the work of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which focuses on prevention, treatment and support programs in 15 countries hard-hit by the AIDS epidemic, 12 of them in Africa. Bush launched the $15 billion plan in 2003, and in 2008, Congress tripled the budget to $48 billion over five years. Despite Obama's more ambitious goals, the plan's budget is not expected to increase. Instead, officials said the expanded targets would be funded through savings achieved by making the program more efficient and cutting the costs of treatment.
