 This coming July, the Global AIDS Conference returns to the United States for the first time in 22 years. Why was it gone so long and what does it mean for U.S. leadership in the global fight against AIDS that it's coming back now? Well, the Global AIDS Conference occurs once every two years. The first several were in the United States. It started in 1985 in Atlanta. It stopped coming in the United States in 1990 when a new legislation was put into force by Congress banning visitors and migrants living with HIV. And the ban was recently lifted. The ban was lifted by President Obama. The process of getting the ban lifted began under President Bush. CSIS played a very integral role actually in scoping out, drawing attention to this and scoping out the nature of the law and what it was going to take to get the law lifted. And once that happened, it was very interesting, once that happened, the organizers, the global organizers of the conference immediately snapped to and actually altered their internal decision-making to make it possible to bring it back here on an accelerated basis. So it'll be here July 22nd to 27th next summer. And it'll be 25,000 people, 2,000 journalists, 1,000 to 1,500 youth volunteers. And President Obama will in all likelihood almost certainly address the opening plenary on Sunday the 22nd. So this is a major development. It's something that has the potential for really bringing across to the American public the realities of HIV AIDS which are mixed but leaning in a very positive direction. Now this isn't the only major development recently. I mean, people are talking in 2011 about the end of AIDS. I mean, the economist did a whole cover story about it. What does it mean? I mean, are we really, can we see the end line? Are we at the finish line? Where are we in that process? Well, it's very interesting that from multiple directions there's a convergence of opinion that over this remarkable last decade in which you've had a surge of investments in bringing forward treatment care and prevention, that we're starting to see the results of that. You've got 6.6 million people on treatment that brings down the transmission rates. You've got prevention programs that are beginning to lower new incidents of HIV. And you have modeling that's going on that's beginning to say that you can credibly say that you can see the arc of this epidemic beginning to turn down in the foreseeable future. Plus we have scientific breakthroughs. We have the new prevention to treat data, the North Carolina O5-2 study, a dramatic piece of evidence that says that when you do put people on treatment you have a 96 percent cut in transmission. You have also the breakthrough in development of new microbicide technologies that give women the ability to block transmission. You have our greater knowledge around the prevention of mother-to-child transmission. Very important. So when you take all of those things together, it creates a package that is quite credible scientifically and operationally in being able to say that the beginning of the end is foreseeable and that gives you a context in looking at this conference and in looking at the payoff of U.S. leadership and investments on this. And that's tremendously great progress, great news. But it's the result of a long process, a lot of hard work and a lot of money that's been spent to tackle this epidemic. Are you concerned at all that some of this progress might be undermined as we go forward with a more austere budget climate? You have to be concerned. This last year was the first time since the early part of the last decade when international aid took off for HIV that there was an actual downturn. Kaiser Family Foundation has come forward with new data that shows that downturn, U.N. AIDS makes this point as well. The global economic recession is taking a hit out of the commitments. One of the big bright spots is that U.S. determination and resilience has been quite remarkable. And while our budgets have not been growing like this, they've been relatively stable, they have held, and they've held at a fairly dramatic level. I mean, on HIV AIDS alone, we're talking about $7 billion a year on the international side, on the domestic side, $16 billion. If you add in other health investments globally, it's $9, $10 billion per year. Those budgets have held. They may not hold forever. We still have continued a budget debt and deficit issues out on the horizon that have not been addressed. But one of the reasons why they have held is that the American public has a confidence in the value of this. Their concrete results, survey after survey, shows the American public stands by this. They understand the gravity of this, and they understand the value of U.S. leadership. And they're convinced that there is a payoff to this. The other very important factor is that it has strong bipartisan democratic and Republican support, very strong support from the faith community, which has been integral to the response and the effectiveness, a very strong support within the U.S. business community, which has rallied behind this. And, of course, very strong support from the foundations. Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Clinton Foundation, President Clinton, President Bush, it's a very unusual consortium of actors who have rallied behind continued U.S. leadership. Well, it's certainly an exciting time. Steve, thanks for being with us today. Thank you.