Dr. Luis Emilio Montalvo, the highly respected head of the Presidential AIDS Council (COPRESIDA), announced yesterday that the Global Fund the United Nations based in Geneva, Switzerland, has allocated US$47.5 million dollars to fight AIDS in the Dominican Republic. According to Montalvo, this will permit the government to cover 95 percent of the medical needs of AIDS patients in the DR. In a related story, the Director General of the Office of Sexually Transmitted Diseases said that 13,200 individuals are actually on the lists of HIV/AIDS patients in the country, but that this figure is inaccurate. He said that other ?official? figures place the number at 2.2 percent of the population, or close to 200,000 people. According to the press release, as many as 10,000 children will become orphans in the next five to ten years because of AIDS. For more information, see
http://www.globalfundatm.org