President Bush encouraged Congress to swiftly approve his $15 billion HIV/AIDS initiative Tuesday from the East Room of the White House.

The President first presented the concept of the plan in his State of the Union address in January as part of his continued policy position of compassionate conservatism.

The Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief is designed to prevent 7 million new AIDS infections and treat a minimum of 2 million people with life-extending drugs while providing care for those suffering from AIDS in foreign countries and children orphaned by the disease.

“HIV and AIDS is a tragedy for millions of men, women and children and a threat to stability of entire countries and regions of our world. Our nation has the ability, and therefore the duty, to confront this grave public-health crisis,” Bush said.

Current estimates show there are nearly 30 million people living with HIV or AIDS on the continent of Africa, three million of those cases appearing in people under the age of 15. In Botswana, nearly 40 percent of the adult population is infected with HIV, and AIDS has decreased the average life expectancy by more than 30 years.

Bush thanked Secretary of State Colin Powell and Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson for their continued dedication to his initiative. Thompson is also the chairman of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which awarded $4 million on April 25 to Madagascar to help prevent an explosion of the epidemic.

Bush also thanked the chairs and ranking members of pertinent Congressional committees already considering and working on the bill, called the United States Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria Act of 2003.

U.S. Reps. Henry Hyde, R-Illinois, and Tom Lantos, D-California, were among government officials who introduced the bill in the House of Representatives and were thanked by Bush Tuesday. Hyde and Lantos are working on the bill in the Committee on International Relations.

“The world is on the verge of a modern-day plague that not only threatens the developing world, but the stability and health of the entire globe,” Hyde said, calling the suffering in Africa a prelude to what would soon happen in Asia and Latin American if the pandemic was not stemmed.

Powell, who has been a staunch proponent of Bush’s initiative, met with the Foreign Relations Committee, one of the main Committees that will likely address the bill Tuesday.

But according to Andy Fisher, press secretary for Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Indiana, the meeting did not focus on the HIV/AIDS bill but rather the Bush’s administrations plans for the new government being set up in Iraq and the temperament of the Middle East after the U.S war against Iraq.

Fisher said the Senate Foreign Relations Committee would consider the bill by the middle of May and that the House Committee was considering a version of the bill this week.

The U.S. has already greatly increased its efforts in curbing the worldwide spread of AIDS by increasing total spending to fight the disease in foreign nations by nearly 100 percent since January 2001.