While Congress is currently renewing a proposed $30 billion five-year extension of George W. Bush’s President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, global health specialists expressed concern at a December 11 Senate committee meeting regarding the percentage of those funds that will be used for abstinence-only HIV/AIDS programming (boston.com, 12/12).

For the past five years, PEPFAR had required that a third of its total HIV prevention budget be spent on promoting abstinence. The Boston Globe reports that Richard G. Lugar, an Indiana Republican, suggested before the Senate yesterday that 50 percent of the budget be spent on programs supporting abstinence and monogamy. Mark Dybul, the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator, said that he “strongly favored” this strategy.

According to the Globe, critics such as Dr. Helen L. Smits from the Institute of Medicine argue that the leaders of beneficiary countries should decide how prevention funding will be spent on developing culturally specific programs. “If a country discovers it has a big [problem] with needle sharing,” she says, “they could devote all their money in one year to stamp it out.”