George Bush

July 29 (Bloomberg) -- President George W. Bush, whose international program has given $15 billion to combat AIDS in poor countries, is ignoring the growing epidemic in U.S. blacks, an advocacy group says.

More than 500,000 U.S. blacks carry HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, according to the report today from the Black AIDS Institute, based in Los Angeles. Seven of 15 poor countries served by Bush's $15-billion international treatment and prevention program have fewer infected people, the group said.

Blacks account for about half of new HIV infections in the U.S. each year, even though they represent 13 percent of the population, government figures show. The virus has become the leading cause of death in black women ages 25 to 34 years, and the second-leading cause for men 35 to 44, said Phill Wilson, the institute's chief executive officer. While Bush requires that countries have a national AIDS plan to get funds for HIV treatment, the U.S. has no plan of its own, Wilson said.

``The lack of a comprehensive AIDS strategy is devastating,'' Wilson said in a telephone interview yesterday. ``We continue to work in this environment of `Alice in Wonderland' HIV prevention, where what is, isn't, and what isn't, is.''

Wilson criticized Bush for championing sexual abstinence programs as a tool of HIV prevention. Studies suggest the approach provides no information to help those who later become sexually active avoid infection. Bush also has continued a ban on federal dollars for programs that let people exchange dirty needles used to inject drugs for clean ones, a strategy that has proven effective, Wilson said.

``We've allowed ideology to trump science,'' Wilson said. Bush's AIDS Program Ignores Epidemic in U.S. Blacks (President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief)

U.S. Domestic Spending

The administration is spending $402 million in the current fiscal year combating AIDS among minority groups, Bush spokeswoman Emily Lawrimore said today in a voice mail. More than $99 billion has been spent for treatment and care of people with HIV and AIDS since 2001, she said.

``The administration is committed to fighting HIV/AIDS in African American communities and in all communities,'' Lawrimore said.

About 2.7 million people worldwide became infected with the AIDS virus last year, the United Nations said today in a separate report. New infections were unchanged from the previous year even as the percentage of young people having sex before age 15 fell in many African countries, and nations moved to provide pregnant mothers with drugs that prevent babies from catching HIV, the UN report found. Deaths from AIDS fell.

Some 25,000 researchers, advocates, and doctors will gather in Mexico City in a week for the biennial International AIDS Conference. Activists gathering there are waiting for a new government estimate of the number of annual U.S. infections. UNAIDS estimated 2007 North American infections at 54,000.

Gene Variant

Africans who live in the region south of the Sahara desert and their descendants around the world carry a gene variant that may make them more prone to infection, according to a July 16 study in the journal Cell Host & Microbe.

Wilson, 52, said he founded the Black AIDS Institute nine years ago to understand why the disease was spreading in black communities and how best to deal it.

Of the 33 million HIV-infected people in the world, about 22 million live in sub-Saharan Africa, according to UNAIDS. Bush pledged in 2003 to give $15 billion over five years for AIDS treatments in 15 African countries.

The President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, as it's called, has been a great success, Wilson said. Bush is expected to sign follow-up legislation, passed by Congress, giving $50 billion to the program through 2013. About 2 percent of all U.S. blacks are infected.

Still, ``U.S. policy treats AIDS as a foreign policy issue, but virtually ignores the epidemic among black citizens here at home,'' said the Reverend Al Sharpton, founder and chief executive officer of the National Action Network, a civil rights advocacy group, in a statement.

To contact the reporter on this story: John Lauerman in Boston at jlauerman@bloomberg.net.