[START RECORDING]

MARK WAINBERG, PH.D.: My name is Mark Wainberg and it is now my privilege and honor to introduce the next high profile session at our conference. This next session features three world leaders in the fight against AIDS. We welcome to the stage Dr. Helene Gayle, who is my co-chair of this conference, and the president of the International AIDS Society, as well as former U.S. President William Jefferson Clinton, and UN Special Envoy Stephen Lewis of Canada.

HELENE GAYLE, M.D.: Thank you very much. Thank you, Mark, and thank you all for being here. It is now my great honor and privilege to introduce Stephen Lewis, who is the United Nations Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa. I think this audience knows Stephen Lewis and his work well, but I want to just take a few moments to talk about some of the things that characterize his work and his commitment.

Stephen Lewis is chair of The Stephen Lewis Foundation and author of the national bestseller, “Race Against Time,” and, as mentioned, he is the UN special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa. He is a lifelong social democratic diplomat, and he has focused most of his humanitarian efforts on the African continent. Mr. Lewis' career at the UN has spanned more than two decades. He served as Canada's ambassador to the UN, and is the deputy executive director of UNICEF. He previously had a career as a prominent politician and journalist in Canada.

Besides all of those things, Stephen Lewis is an unabashed and unapologetic voice for HIV, for reducing poverty, for social justice and, particularly, for the rights of women around the world. I am proud and pleased to say that I consider Stephen Lewis a friend and a mentor. I've learned so much from him, particularly about what difference
political leadership, political will, commitment and passion continue to make for our struggle, to make HIV history around the world. So thank you, and I introduce and bring to the podium Stephen Lewis.

STEPHEN LEWIS: Helene and fellow delegates, this is a daunting task and I am not often daunted. I spent much of
my life speaking and yet I admit to feeling slight tremors of apprehension about introducing the former president of the United States. I'm going to try to do so by calling upon what I've learned of his foundation, a foundation irreversibly committed to fighting the pandemic of HIV and AIDS.

My first encounter with the Clinton Foundation occurred at the International AIDS Conference in Bangkok in 2004. I approached Ira Magaziner - whom I did not know and who runs the foundation - asking him, almost begging him, to intervene on behalf of the little mountain kingdom of Lasutu, which was being pummeled into submission by the force of the pandemic. Within one month, I repeat, within one month, the Clinton Foundation has signed a memorandum of agreement with the Ministry of Health in Lasutu, clearing the way for a range of support on vital fronts, from negotiating the purchase and distribution of low-cost antiretroviral drugs and laboratory equipment to the provision of technical assistance.

I was, quite frankly, stunned. I had been working in the envoy role for more than three years, and my experience
with a number of international entities had led me to believe that they moved with supernatural acceleration from inertia to paralysis.

In my subsequent experience, that perverse pattern was never true of the Clinton Foundation as it expanded its
work. Whenever there was a particular need, whenever there was a crisis, whenever there was a moment of opportunity, they could be confidently called upon. I never abused the access because, of course, there are limits to the requests that can be legitimately be made, and limits to the capacity of the Clinton Foundation to respond.

But what has filled my soul with admiration is the sense within the Clinton Foundation that every minute lost in
the struggle against the virus is a life lost, and that quality of agency, of emergency, is what is so desperately
needed in the face of the continuing carnage.

You will recall that in the dialogue yesterday, the president, when asked about the reasons for his dramatic
engagement in the response to the pandemic said, "I wanted to stop people from dying who didn't have to die." That, to my mind, is what distinguishes the Clinton Foundation.

As I stand here, my fellow delegates permit me to remind you again of a fact of which we cannot be reminded too
often. We have lost an incalculable number of lives, which should never have been lost. That's a matter of excruciating pain and unconscionable political neglect about what historians will one day write, and nothing will stand out more in the judgment of history than the toll on women, old and young.

For the last 62 months, criss-crossing the continent I love, the continent of Africa, I have watched the faces of
the women of Africa, especially the young women of Africa, stoic, formidable, loving, courageous beyond the capacity of words to define. I have watched those faces disappear, losing in the process a generation of leadership, generosity, intelligence and strength. It is unbearable. As we enter the next period with a spirit of guarded anticipation, of cautious optimism, of high expectations about scientific exploration and discovery, about the roll-out of treatment and intensified prevention, what must suffuse everything we do is the recognition that the sands of time have run through the hourglass, that a civilized international community will tolerate no longer the often reckless indifference to the value of human life.

Bill Clinton has brought the extraordinary force of his charismatic and principled persona to the fight against
the AIDS pandemic. It introduces a true measure of hope. I trust this isn't presumptuous, Mr. President, but it seems to me that what you are doing now, at this moment in your formidable career, is your greatest contribution to the
betterment of the human condition.

Ladies and gentlemen, President William Jefferson Clinton.


MR. WILLIAM JEFFERSON CLINTON: Thank you very much. Thank you. I'm very fine, thank you for asking. Thank you very much. Thank you for the warm welcome. Thank you, Helene Gayle. Thank you, Stephen Lewis.

I owe a great deal to Helene Gayle for her dedication to the Centers of Disease Control. She was a valued member
of my administration. She was great at the Gates Foundation and at CARE, and she has been great as President of the International AIDS Society.

I always love the sharing the stage with Stephen Lewis, though he is a hard act to follow. I thank him for a lifetime of public service. He was Canada's ambassador to the United Nations. An important leader at UNICEF before he
took on his current role and, I must say, all over the world, whenever people grow lax in this fight, Stephen's passion, his demand and his no-nonsense approach always wake the rest of us up and put people back to work. The world is in your debt and the people at this conference are in your debt.

Thank you, Stephen.

I had a great time here yesterday in my conversation with Bill Gates, and I think that maybe the most important
thing I can do today is to simply thank all of you who are devoting your lives to this fight. You feel the plight of
others, and find freedom in their release. I urge you to continue to do this, and I hope that this week, we will all
have learned a lot from one another, the researchers, the fund-raisers, the advocates, the health care professionals,
the volunteers, the people living with HIV and AIDS.

There was a time when we needed these meetings to call the world's attention to the problem of AIDS. Today we
need them to learn from each other. To leave smarter, as well as more dedicated. Four years ago, when Nelson Mandela and I closed the conference in Barcelona, the world was radically different. Today I want mostly to talk about the future, but it's worth taking a moment to realize how much has changed in those four years.

Four years ago, there were 6 million in the developing world in desperate need of treatment to stay alive. Outside of Brazil, fewer than 70,000 were getting the medicines they needed. All of China, all of India, all of Southeast Asia, all of the Caribbean, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, infection rates were rapidly increasing.

Today, more than 1.3 million people are receiving treatment. We didn't make it to 3 million in 2005, but soon we will and go beyond. Last year, many nations achieved a drop in infections among young people. Southeast Asia has
seen steady declines in overall prevalence. China, once in a state of denial, deserves all of our respect for turning on a dime and acknowledging the problem and approaching it systematically. Over 20 countries are providing ARVs to 50-percent or more of their populations. Some states in India have achieved declining prevalence rates. And next year, I believe Rwanda can achieve universal access to treatment, as children and people in rural areas begin to receive the care and services they deserve.

Of course, there is a long, long way to go, but there is some good news too, and we should not forget it. When I
made a commitment as a private citizen leaving the White House to help countries scale up their care and treatment
efforts, I actually had no idea where to begin. I just had a reunion with Prime Minister Denzil Douglas of St. Kitts and Nevis, who asked me in Barcelona four years ago to help him, and he said, "We don't have a denial problem, we have a money problem and an organization and resource problem." I had done a lot of work in the Caribbean when I was president, and I said, "Well, Denzil, what do you want me to do about it?" He said, "I want you to fix it." I said, "Okay."

I didn't have a clue what I was agreeing to. I had a total of 12 people working in my foundation in Harlem. It was all we could do to answer the mail, but I knew that something had to be done. I began by calling my old friend, Ira Magaziner, who worked with me on health care and electronic commerce in the White House. I asked him what we
could do to have the biggest impact in the shortest amount of time. Whatever progress we had made in the last four years is a result of his efforts and those who have come to our aid, who have worked with us all over the world, both as paid employees and partners, and as volunteers. They now number about 500.

We knew in the beginning something had to be done about the prohibitive costs of medicine and tests. Four years ago, first-line generics cost about $500 a person a year. So we set out to organize a drug market to shift it from a high-margin, low-volume, uncertain-payment process to a low-margin, high-volume, certain-payment process. We worked with the generic drug companies, and with donor nations beginning with Canada and Ireland. Eventually, including Norway, Sweden, and in the Caribbean, the United Kingdom and France, and the Asia Pacific region, now Australia, to guarantee that prompt payment. We were able to lower the price to just under $140 a person a year in the beginning. We then worked to reduce the cost of CB4 and viral lo testing, and equipment, and reduced the price by over 80 percent. We have achieved further reductions of over 50 percent on second-line drugs, although we don't have enough of them in the agreement yet, and on pediatric formulations as well as rapid tests, which can now be had for between 50 cents and 65 cents apiece.

Today the adult formulations cost about just less than $120 a person a year. Children's medicines have gone from $600 to less than $200. Almost 60 nations are now accessing these prices, and about 30-percent of the people on
ARVs. More than 400,000 of them are getting the medicine under these agreements. I am very grateful to the more than 500 staff and volunteers in 25 countries who are helping governments at their request to scale up AIDS care and treatment programs.

This is just part of the good work being done by the Global Fund, by the United States effort and by other countries’ bilateral programs, the Gates Foundation, UNICEF, and so many others involved in all aspects in the fight
against HIV and AIDS. And it's worth taking some time to say not everything has gone wrong.

Despite the progress, however, there is still too much bad news and too many blind alleys, too many unanswered
questions. Since Barcelona, millions more have died. Millions more have been affected. The vaccine still seems a
decade away. We see that prevention efforts are sporadic and some have produced mixed results. We know that Stephen must still persist, unbelievably, after all this time in too many places, and also unbelievably, 90-percent of those who are infected do not know their status. It is no wonder that millions of more people are infected every year.

I have people all the time coming to me in the States and say, "Aren't you fighting a losing battle? Think of all these irresponsible people out there infecting millions more people every year." And I'd say, "You're only irresponsible
if you know you are positive and you infect someone." Ninety-percent of the people do not know their status. That's what I would say to them.

Actually, to you, I would modify it and say, "If you know you are in a high-risk group, and you take a chance, you
are also being irresponsible, even if you don't know your status." But I have to be more categorical when I'm out
there trying to sell the rest of the world and build more allies.

Here's the bottom line. We know how to overcome AIDS. We know how to prevent millions of needless deaths. We know it can be done with urgent sustain and strategic action. First there must be enough money, of course, to fund effective prevention efforts and to treat all those who need it, and to continue the important research work on vaccines, microbicides, and all the other areas that need the research. I am profoundly grateful for all Bill and Melinda Gates have done through their foundations, but especially for their recent half-a-billion commitment to the Global Fund over the next five years.

There is no better mechanism to channel the funds needed to beat AIDS, and I say that as someone who respects
the bilateral programs, and without the bilateral programs in the beginning, I could not have even begun my work. But no bilateral program, no matter how impactful, can take the place of the Global Fund, and we have to make sure that it's properly funded.

I also think it's important that every one of us, before he leaves, thanks Dr. Richard Fitchum [misspelled?] for his leadership to the Fund overall these years. He's done a tremendous job on helping those helping those affected
with AIDS, TB and malaria. Countless people are alive today because of Richard's work, and I wish him well in the future. Second point I want to make is while more money is necessary, it is nowhere near sufficient. It is our moral
obligation to ensure that the enormous contributions already made and those that will be made are used most efficiently. Every single wasted dollar puts a life at risk.

A few days ago, my foundation unveiled our consortium for strategic operation research here in Toronto. It's an
initiative designed to help ensure that this huge investment of resources results in the highest quality care, most
efficiently delivered for as many HIV infected people as possible. We want to apply the same planning methods that
Fortune 500 companies use to manage their operations, so that we can make the most effective use of what will always be scarce resources until the number of people who are HIV positive begins to drop dramatically. Using simple opensource computer models, we'll be able to help governments save more lives with the same human and financial resources. The third thing we have to do is to intensify and redouble [misspelled?] effective prevention. Last year, as I said, there were over four million new infections, 90-percent of the people not knowing their status. Alarming trends can be observed all over the world.

Now, for the last four years, I have focused mostly on expanding access to care and treatment, with a view toward
obtaining universal access by the end of the decade. We will not succeed through scaled-up care and treatment alone. Prevention efforts also have to be scaled up simultaneously. They will not be successful, however, without the treatment options, so we can't do one without the other. Just as no government organization can run the fight against AIDS alone, prevention care and treatment are intertwined, and we cannot realize universal treatment - I'll say it again - let alone stop AIDS, unless we also see prevention as a part of a mutually dependent strategy.

I salute the efforts of UNAIDS, Civil Society, the treatment activists, the private sector and all those committed to unite for prevention. Prevention can work. We've seen it in prevalence reduction in South India, Cambodia, and Thailand. We've seen several African countries with reductions of over 25-percent in young people between the ages of 15 and 24.

Last month, I visited a microbicide test site in Durbin with Bill and Melinda Gates, and was heartened to talk to trial participants, and learned the exciting gains being made there. Our foundation is now partnering with the International Partnership for Microbicides to help accelerate their work by guaranteeing proper care and treatment for all the participants in the test trials, just as PEPFAR is doing for the Gates Foundation in Durbin.

Empowering women to protect themselves seems so elemental, and yet when I hear people pontificating about AIDS, and acting as if we can do everything through abstinence, I think they don't know what most women are up against in too many parts of the world today.

I also want to say a word about the recent promising study with regard to male circumcision and its role in reducing the risk of HIV transmission. I know the scientific jury is still out, and I know a couple of more studies are being done, but should this be shown to be effective, we will have another means to prevent the spread of the disease and
to save lives. And we will have another job to do, a big job - first in selling it, and secondly in providing safe,
effective comprehensive and rapid ways of doing it. So I think it's important that as we leave here, we all be prepared for a green light that could have a staggering impact on the male population, but will be, frankly, a lot of trouble to get done. And we have to be prepared to do it. We keep going around at people all over the world and telling them not to be queasy about the hard things. If the research shows that this saves lives, we'll just have to get after it, and deal with it, deal with the cultural inhibitions and deal with all the other problems.

We can't leave here without at least a commitment to watching it. I also think we have to not give up on the search
for a vaccine. We should continue to support the International AIDS Vaccine Institute, and all the government scientist foundations and private citizens who are engaged in this search. I know it seems like a long way away. When I launched that Millennium Vaccine Initiative in my last year as president, we thought we could get there within a decade. Now, we still think we are a decade away. The more we rely on the biochemistry, the more frustrating it is, but it's hard to imagine a world totally without AIDS, without a vaccine, if not a cure. So I thank the people that are not too tired to continue to this work, and not too frustrated who believe there has to be an answer here and are determined to find it.

Since I waded into the circumcision thicket, I want to say a little bit more about testing. I just don't believe we can reverse this if we keep having more people infected every year than we are increasing the number of people on medication. If we keep having 90-percent of the people not knowing their status, I don't see how we can do that. The rapid tests now available through my foundation cost 50 to 65 cents. We have to give it twice to make sure. Results are available in 15 minutes or so. This epidemic is 100-percent preventable. More people have to agree to be tested.

I will never forget when my wife and I lost our first friend to AIDS in the 1980s. I watched him, early in the ’80s. I sat in the hospital room as he was dying with those scabrous marks all over his face, feeling totally helpless. When all the activists said, "Well, we can't push testing too hard, because after all, there is no medicines, people are going to be discriminated against and all that they are going to find out that they are going to die sooner or later." I felt enormous sympathy. We still need to fight discrimination and we still need to ensure that treatment options are available to anyone, and even encouraged to be tested.

But there is a different equation today. That's why I think these universal voluntary opt out testing programs in countries particularly that have significant infection rates are terribly important.

Stephen mentioned the government of Lasutu. The WHO has worked there, as well as our foundation on this Know Your Status program. Other countries are doing similar things. If it's done right, Lasutu's infection rate will plummet and more people will live. I was there last month and met with several young people for whom this Know Your Status campaign was a source of pride. I met with a couple of people who were working with us, a man, a former boxing coach who was literally on his deathbed, his C4 count was so low and is now 750. And he goes around, obviously still very fit-looking, and tells people that they have nothing to be ashamed of, they should know their status.

Most remarkably, I met a young woman who works as one of our expert patients for the foundation, who became
infected after she was raped. There are still societies in this world that are if you are raped, somehow it's your fault
and you are supposed to go around and be ashamed for the rest of your life, and hide, and not tell people things. This woman was unbelievable. Instead of giving in to her shame and allowing someone else's oppression to define her life down forever, she goes out with pride in her communities and says, "Look, what can I make happen that's good, as a result of this terrible shape that befell me? Will I spend the rest of my life feeling sorry for myself? I don't think so." So she goes around saying, "Look, this happened to me. This could happen to you. This could happen to anybody. We don't need to be ashamed of this. I'm HIV-positive. I am not ashamed. I am going to get the medicine. My government tells me I cannot me discriminated against. We have to deal with this. You need to be tested so you don't wind up positive too."

It's unbelievable. This young woman will be more good with CT [misspelled?] than I ever could, by standing
there and being proud to be a living, breathing human being entitled to dignity, equal respect and asking people to do
the responsible thing for themselves and all the other people in their community and their nation.

Let me just say another word about stigma. We all know it's really not a problem for people with HIV. It's a
problem for everybody else. Stigma is about a twisted place in the mind of the stigmatizer. A place of fear, normally,
and ignorance. Last year, the China government, which as I said, it really got after this. Even asked our foundation to
work within the Ministry of Health, jokingly said to me, "Oh well, I know you think we're a non-democratic country and we're an authoritarian country, but believe it or not, we can't order people to change their minds and hearts. So
would you please take a tour of rural capitals, and do media events where people see you playing on the floor with
children who are HIV-positive, and having dinner, having meetings, having conversations with younger people who are HIV-positive, showing people who have AIDS who are going to live because they’ve gotten medicine, both children and young adults? Would you please do that? We think it will help to fight the stigma."

So I did, and it was really an unusual example of foundation and government cooperation. I felt like I had been sent on a tour of the Chinese countryside by the government just because people would be surprised if I didn't keel over after having embraced all these people with HIV and But we can't be too arrogant, patronizing or disdainful about this. All of us are afraid of the unknown, of what we are previously experienced, and if you can come to these meetings forever and a day, it may be impossible to imagine, but until the tainted blood transfusion equipment began to ravage Chinese villages, there were millions and tens of millions of people in rural China who did not have a clue what AIDS was. It could have been something from another planet.

So we have to continue this work. This is something that the political leaders don't have to do alone, and may not even be able to do best. I want to say a special word of thanks to Richard Gere to all the work he's done in India
getting movie stars, TV personalities, people in the media, people that are looked up to, and identified with into this
business of fighting stigma.

The last time I was in India, a family, a small family tried to commit family suicide in a rural village because they were being discriminated against by all their neighbors who still believe that they could all become HIV positive if they were breathed on by any of these people walking down the street. So thank you, Richard Gere and thank you, all of you, who are fighting this. We cannot forget this.

I'm getting to that. These are the same people that were here yesterday. Let me say one other thing about the
status of women that we talked about before. Stephen Lewis and others, Bill and Melinda Gates talked about addressing gender and equality. I just want to say this as a philanthropist. I also work on development issues, climate
change issues, other issues in developing countries, and if the gender equality cause can first surface through the fight
against HIV and AIDS, we will see that all these other problems will be more easily addressed.

We can't really adequately develop poor countries and their economies. We can't really address any of these other
challenges unless we convince people that they cannot keep throwing away the potential of half of their citizens. We
know the population stabilizes. We know the economy grows. We know the new challenges are embraced. So there is a way that fighting AIDS can help developing countries to do all these other things.

The fourth thing we have to do is to keep reaching the hard-to-reach populations. The children, the people in
rural areas and border lines. In Bangkok two years ago, that was one of the most stunning messages that I had sitting half a world away. Couple of years ago, only 10,000 children outside of Brazil and Thailand were getting pediatric antiretrovirals, while over 500,000 a year were dying. But a little over a year ago, our foundation worked to reduce the price of pediatric medicine, as I said, by about two-thirds, from about $600 to a little under $200. We then donated drugs, clinical and programmatic support to double the number of treatment on in a year.

That sounds so good, until you say we went from 10,000 to 20,000, it sounds pathetic. It shows you how much
young children were worse off, even then the rest of the population. But by the first quarter of 2007, we think we'll
be supporting another 60,000 children. Now thanks to the leadership of the governments of France, Norway, Chile,
Brazil, the U.K. recently announced their support. There will be others. UNITAID will be able to provide treatment
for all children who need it. This is important and we have to do it.

We're also making an effort to develop models that can be replicated to provide health care in rural areas. In
July. I was in Rwanda with our partner, my friend, Dr. Paul Farmer, who is here, and who has done such an astonishing job in developing health care in Haiti. In Rwanda, the Clinton Foundation and Partners in Health are working as we are in Lasutu and Malawi and elsewhere to expand the availability of medical services, not just for HIV and AIDS, but for other things as well.

Rwinkwavu, in eastern Rwanda, was devastated in the genocide. We're partnered there in a hospital that's just
been reopened, making astonishing strides in establishing good quality care with limited human resources, dealing not
only with a handful of doctors and nurses, but a remarkable number of health care support workers trained by Paul
Farmer's people according the model that has worked so well in Haiti, and I thank him for that.

In India, we are working to train 150,000 doctors who still provide amazing services in rural India, but they know
very little about AIDS.

In Ethiopia, thanks to Dr. Ted Resses’ [misspelled?] visionary leadership, and he’s here today, and I thank him
for his leadership as a minister of health Twenty-fivethousand health care workers will soon be deployed across the
nation, where over 80-percent of the people live in rural areas.

Programs like this are absolutely key to our ultimate success. As Bill Gates said yesterday, "There are lots of
places where the absence of health care infrastructure is more important than the money to buy the medicine." Keeping people from getting their antiretrovirals. This effort to treat people in remote rural areas requires both the support of national governments and those doing the real work. Our ability to empower them by providing systems, infrastructure, human and financial resources, drugs and tests, will I believe, determine that course of this epidemic over the next five years.

I really want to say one other thing about this. I'm in Canada. I'm an American. My daughter was born in a
hospital in Little Rock, Arkansas, with the aid of a nurse from Guyana. I came to love her very much, and unlike most health care workers who leave their native land, she actually went home, so that when I went to Guyana as president, Hillary and I were able to have a reunion with her. All over the world, there are people whose health is better in wealthy countries because of people who left their own countries to go where they could earn more money with their great gifts.

My foundation is working hard to reverse this trend in our partner countries by making sure they have the skilled
workers they need to do the job. Kenya, for example, unlike much of the rest of Africa, is a country with a surplus of trained nurses. Get this, but for reasons to convoluted to address here, you'd be here ’til tomorrow morning, the
government, believe it or not, cannot lawfully hire them at this point. So we're hiring them, and training them to treat
the AIDS patients. Hundreds already. They are working through the National Healthcare Systems in rural areas, and
by the end of the year we will be supporting about 1,000 of them, all of whom will be transitioned onto the national
payroll within the next two years.

As a result, tens of thousands of people in rural Kenya will now have access to AIDS care and treatment, who
otherwise would have died, and hundreds and hundreds of nurses who otherwise would have come to North America, to Europe or someplace else, will stay at home and serve their people.

In Ethiopia, through our partnership with the Yale University School of Public Health and Management, we've
recruited 23 experienced hospital administrators to be based in 13 Ethiopian hospitals for the next year to work with
doctors and administrators not only to help improve the operations of the hospitals, but to develop standards and
systems which can then be applied to more than 100 others over the next three to five years.

These efforts are beginning to bear fruit. In Malawi and other countries in which I work, with the support of the
British government and other partners, we've just had the first year in recent memory when there was virtually no outmigration of health care professionals. I think most people want to stay at home, but they need to be able to make a living to do it, and we need to help them.

There are really practical things that the NGOs can do. For example, my foundation has a policy of not hiring
people away from governments and community based organizations. We can't expect nations to maintain or
increase capacity if the best people are constantly being lured away by higher salaries. So instead, what we try to do
is attract good people from the private sector and people from the African and Asia [inaudible], now living in the U.S. and Europe. We are able to do this and still keep our overhead costs at 2-percent. It has not been unduly
expensive and it has been very good policy. I think it is important that all of us in the NGO community try to set a
good example on this important issue.

These are the things that I think we have to do as we leave here. Money, money spent more effectively, prevention,
more testing, not compulsory but voluntary and empowering, lifting the status of women, continuing the search for
medical answers through microbicides and vaccines, reaching the hard to reach population, developing the infrastructure and getting treatment out to every single soul who needs it. In just a few days, I will be 60 years old. I hate it, but it's true. For most of my working life, I was the youngest person doing whatever I was doing, then one day I woke up and I was the oldest person in every room. Now that I have more days behind me than ahead of me, I try to wake up with a discipline of gratitude every day. I realize that I came from, by American standards, very humble circumstances when I was born in my home state at the end of World War II.

Our per capita income was barely half the national average, and I had a totally improbable life, but I know I was not
born in a log cabin that I built myself. I had teachers, a coherent community, a decent health care system. I knew that there would be some connection between the efforts I made in life and the results that I achieved. The longer I live and the more I travel, the more I realize that intelligence and effort and ability and dreams are evenly distributed across all of humanity in every country across all races, and religions and cultures.

What is not evenly distributed are the mechanisms to give life to all those things. The opportunities, the investment, the systematic capacity that establishes a link between a person's intelligence, ability, effort and dreams, and the picture of life that emerges. There is no more tragic example of this then HIV and AIDS, but there are many, many others. If we can turn the tide on this epidemic, it will unleash a burst of energy and belief in human potential that I think will spill over into TB, malaria, into economic development, and into meeting the challenges of climate change, and to anything else you can possibly imagine.

Now, this is a huge conference. There is one person in this conference for every 1,500 HIV-positive people in the
world. That's a pretty high ratio. Think of it. If we pool our efforts, can each of us account for 1,500 lives? I think
we can, if we're organized, persistent and passionate, I think we can. We can break the back of AIDS and lift the
hopes of billions of people. Obligations and the opportunity to fulfill them are gifts from God. The awful burden of AIDS is quite a gift. How fortunate we are that we live in a time when we have the opportunity to meet our obligation, to give many more people back their lives, and their dreams.

Thank you very much.

HELENE GAYLE, M.D.: Hello. Could everybody hold their applause for just a moment? We're a few days early, but I'd like the audience to all join in and sing happy birthday to President Clinton. [Singing]

[END RECORDING]

Source: Transcript provided by kaisernetwork.org -- a free service of the Kaiser Family Foundation

View Video Segments:

Stephen Lewis (5:51)
Canada
Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa
UNAIDS
Bio - Stephen Lewis

William Clinton (42:55)
Former U.S. President
Founder
William J. Clinton Foundation
Bio - William Clinton

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