If you don’t know that George Bush just doubled the size of PEPFAR, the Bush anti-HIV/AIDS initiative that was already the largest and most ambitious anti-disease program in human history, you shouldn’t feel too bad. PEPFAR has never gotten much media attention, and this week’s stunning announcement was no different. Here are the dull details, accurately presented by Dan Turner in an L.A. Times op-ed:

Today, Bush upped the ante by asking Congress to double the size of his AIDS program, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, to $30 billion over five years. That is a vast commitment that dwarfs past efforts and provides real hope that humanity will in the near future be able to stop the spread of AIDS—an accomplishment akin, at least in scope, to putting a man on the moon. This disease has killed 25 million people so far and is still raging out of control, especially in Africa.

According to Newsmap, which visually represents how much attention a given topic gets from the international newsmedia, the top story in the UK last night was “Hamas says Israel wounds 2 Gaza gunmen.” PEPFAR? I can’t find it on the UK Newsmap at all. Or on the American one. Or the Canadian or French or Spanish or Australian or German or any of the others.

But can you blame them? Isn't it all a bit dull? I mean, how many stories are you going to write about the fact, as Turner puts it, George Bush “has done more to relieve poverty and disease in Africa…than any other American president”?

My own interest is partly due to a memorable conversation I had with an HIV pharmacologist from the Infectious Disease Institute in Kampala, Uganda. She described how people like her had spent the Clinton administration tirelessly but fruitlessly begging Clinton and other world leaders to send the antiretroviral medication needed to save the lives of those infected. As she watched patient after patient die for lack of meds readily available in the West, progress was virtually non-existent. By the end of the Clinton administration, the number of people in all of sub-Saharan Africa receiving ARV therapy was still pitifully small, almost darkly absurd: 50,000. Then Clinton left, Bush arrived, and before long she was struggling with a very different sort of challenge: finding enough doctors to prescribe the crates of ARV meds that kept arriving. “Bush’s money,” as she repeatedly referred to it, had changed everything.

I hope we can celebrate PEPFAR as a boon for HIV-infected Africans without being insensitive to the plight of the progressive, socially-conscious Westerners who find the program’s existence so irritating. You’ll get a sense of their confusion and pain if you play a little parlor game I’ve developed. Find an article on PEPFAR in a left-of-center publication, and see how long it takes to spot an egregious factual error or misrepresentation that conveniently diminishes the accomplishments of the program.

For a taste of egregious factual error, try this line from an extremely rare attempt by Counterpunch to write about PEPFAR: "three-fourths of the monies allocated for treatment must be spent on the purchase and distribution of antiretroviral drugs from U.S. pharmaceutical manufactures and cannot be substituted by generic alternatives."

Well...no. Not exactly. Or even at all. PEPFAR uses both foreign-made and generic drugs. In cases in which a foreign-manufactured drug violates a patent held by an American pharmaceutical company, the FDA still approves the drug for use by PEPFAR though not for sale in the U.S. itself. So the Counterpunch quote is dead wrong, a plain fabrication that portrays the Bush administration and PEPFAR as slaves to corporate avarice.

For the egregious misrepresentation, try the Guardian’s article on this week’s announcement.

George Bush announced yesterday that the US plans to spend $30bn (£15bn) over five years in Africa and elsewhere to combat HIV/Aids.

This would make the US by far the biggest single donor to the campaign against HIV/Aids and is in addition to the $15bn Washington has been spending since 2003. Parts of Mr Bush's policy are opposed by international health organisations, academics, women's groups, European governments and even the administration's financial watchdog. In line with domestic Christian right orthodoxy, a significant proportion of the funds are channelled to religious groups advocating abstinence until marriage and refusing to distribute condoms, an approach regarded as counter-productive and costing lives.

PEPFAR earmarks less than 7% of its funds to abstinence-advocacy. This number is rarely cited by sites like the Guardian, which instead inevitably describe it in terms like a “significant proportion,” allowing their readers to buy into a widespread liberal myth that abstinence consumes a third of the PEPFAR budget (in fact it consumes a third of PEPFAR’s prevention budget, which is itself 20% of the overall program). And while the “domestic Christian right orthodoxy” may support abstinence as a tool in the fight against HIV transmission, so do public health workers and epidemiologists, who have long argued that abstinence, monogamy, and prophylaxis are all key to reducing transmission of HIV in sub-Saharan Africa.

At the end of March, the National Academies of Science released a report on PEPFAR prepared by an independent panel of epidemiologists, public health workers, and other experts, who had themselves interviewed dozens of other experts for the report. On the issue of abstinence education, they said that none of the experts recommended dropping it from the PEPFAR budget, but there was uncertainty over whether almost-seven-percent was the ideal amount. They did, however, agree that endless debate of the abstinence issue was preventing more productive discussions about how to maximize the effectiveness of PEPFAR. And they also agreed in their request that, as the program approached the end of its five-year run, President Bush announce his desire to renew it for another five years.

Jaime Sepulveda, a professor of global health science at UCSF and the chair of the independent panel, said “PEPFAR has demonstrated what many doubted could be done, namely that HIV/AIDS services can be scaled up rapidly in countries with severe resource constraints and other daunting obstacles.”

Well, Sepulveda and his colleagues got more than they asked for. Bush didn’t just renew his historic initiative, he vastly expanded it. But unlike with the first five-year run of PEPFAR, this time he won’t be around to make good on his promises. That will fall to the next President. So if you think of yourself as a social-justice-loving sort of person, you should make damn sure that whoever you vote for has made clear that, on Africa, they’ll carry forward Bush’s legacy, rather than bringing us back to the dark days of Clintonian indifference.

G8 follow up to this post, here