The five-year scheme, the Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, was unveiled in January and Bush showcased it last week during a whirlwind tour of Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Botswana and Uganda.
"There's no way we can acknowledge this as anything but an effort of unprecedented magnitude in the history of AIDS," said Michel Kazatchkine, director of France's national AIDS research agency (ANRS), at the start of a major conference on AIDS here.
"It's wonderful in its magnitude, I wish that Europe and other countries would follow suit".
Kazatchkine said he was worried, though, about the way in which the money would be administered, fearing that there could be waste or duplication if it were channelled bilaterally.
"My plea would be for a more multilateral effort," he said, pointing to the the Global Fund for Fighting AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, where he chairs a technical panel.
A leading French economist, Jean-Paul Moatti, a professor at the University of the Mediterranean in Marseille, southern France, said the generosity of the plan was undoubted.
If approved - Congress must give it the okay each year – it would account by itself for roughly a third of the $8-10-billion a year needed globally to fight AIDS, he noted.
But Moatti said he was worried whether the US funds might come with ties.
It could be, for instance, that the US would insist that anti-HIV drugs be purchased from US corporations at agreed pricing strategies, even though much money could be saved if drugs came from generic sources or from an open market where generics and patented rivals competed.
Others at the four-day Paris conference wondered whether the tranches in the $15-billion package would survive the annual hurdle of congressional approval unscathed.
And they questioned whether the funds, in an era of budget tightness, would be new money or partially scraped from other foreign-aid allocations, such as the Global Fund, thus robbing Peter to pay Paul.
The House of Representatives has only approved funding of $2-billion of the $3-billion permitted for by law for the plan in the first year of the five-year plan.
The Senate, though, has approved the full $3-billion.
The scheme has already come under fire because of a concession Bush made to conservatives.
A third of the money that is allotted for preventing HIV must go to promoting abstinence rather than safe sex, an idea that veteran AIDS campaigners have said is ineffective. - Sapa-AFP.
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