Source: TIME, AFP, Daily Dish, Associated Press, Seattle Times, IAS press release, Xtra.ca
A two-decade ban on people with HIV visiting or immigrating to the United States will end soon through a Senate bill aimed at fighting AIDS and other diseases in Africa and other poor areas of the world.

LGBT advocates, commentators, and international health advocates hailed a vote Wednesday by US senators to repeal the travel ban.

The 80-16 vote also committed the United States to spending up to $48 billion over the next five years for the most ambitious foreign public health program ever launched by the United States, Associated Press reports.

Congress boosted the President's Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief, known as PEPFAR,  tripling current funding. The AIDS-relief plan offers what Seattle Times calls in an editorial "the strongest and most compassionate response of developed nations to the battle against AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis."

The bill includes a goal to hire and train 140,000 new health-care professionals and paraprofessionals -- the largest commitment of any nation.

The legislation would replace and expand the current $15 billion act that President Bush championed in a State of the Union address and Congress passed in 2003. That act expires at the end of September.

Earlier this year, Democratic Senator John Kerry and Republican Senator Gordon Smith amended PEPFAR to also repeal of the HIV travel ban.

PEPFAR passed with the amendment intact, despite efforts by Republican Senator Jeff Sessions to stop the repeal of the travel ban.

The legislation was tied up for months in ideological wrangling, Seattle Times reports. The Senate's Democratic leadership and President Bush were in one corner, Senate conservatives in another.

Painstaking negotiations were required to resolve whether or not the relief plan would continue to include programs promoting abstinence and marital fidelity and ensuring that religious groups would be among those eligible for the funds. A Republican-led effort to reduce PEPFAR's spending levels was rebuffed.

"Today we are one step closer to ending a discriminatory practice that stigmatizes all those living with HIV, squanders our moral authority, and sets us back in the fight against AIDS," said Kerry in a statement.

If approved by the President, the bill would remove the anti-HIV language from the Immigration and Nationality Act.

The ban first imposed 20 years ago, and made law in 1993, required foreigners with HIV to apply for special waivers and opponents said it discriminated against people with the disease without cause.

"Barring some unforeseen event, the HIV Travel Ban -- a relic of the days when HIV was a source of fear and stigma and terror -- is finally over," commentator Andrew Sullivan wrote on his blog on the Atlantic magazine's website.

"I'm not exaggerating when I say that it's one of the happiest days of my whole life," Sullivan -- a British expatriate -- wrote. "For two and a half decades, I have longed to be a citizen of the country I love and have made my home. I now can. There is no greater feeling."

The U.S. is one of a dozen countries -- including Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Libya and Russia -- that ban travel and immigration for HIV-positive people, AFP reports.

Even China, said Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., recently changed that policy, deciding it was "time to move beyond an antiquated, knee-jerk reaction" to people with HIV.

"There's no excuse for a law that stigmatizes a particular disease," Kerry said Tuesday at a speech to the Center for Strategic & International Studies HIV/AIDS Task Force.

The International AIDS Society (IAS) applauded the Senate its vote. In a statement, the Geneva-based group particularly commended the provision lifting the travel ban.

"We applaud the Senate for rejecting this unjust and sweeping policy that deems HIV-positive individuals inadmissible to the United States," said Joe Solmonese, president of the gay advocacy group Human Rights Campaign.

The ban came out of ignorance about the disease, rights groups said.

"Congress has finally moved to end the HIV ban -- a ban based on myth and misinformation," Rachel Tiven, executive director of Immigration Equality, was quoted as saying in US media.

"For 20 years, the United States has barred HIV-positive travelers from entering the country even for one day. Today the Senate said loud and clear that AIDS exceptionalism must come to an end."

Full article: HIV Travel Ban May End Soon - TIME
US activists praise Senate for lifting HIV travel ban | AFP
The HIV Travel Ban Is Repealed | Atlantic Online
Increased funding for global diseases | Seattle Times
IAS Applauds HIV Entry and Immigration Ban | IAS press release
US Senate votes to repeal HIV travel ban | Xtra.ca