President Bush cemented his own legacy this week, signing into law a dramatic expansion of his already unprecedented effort against AIDS in Africa and other desperate regions. His program is saving literally millions of lives, and it will stand as his greatest bipartisan foreign policy achievement.

Approved with lopsided majorities by the House in April and the Senate last month, Bush signed the bill on Wednesday. It authorizes spending $48 billion over the next five years to fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria — the three diseases of poverty — in the areas of the world that most need help.

The $48 billion represents a more than threefold expansion of the program that Bush first announced in his State of the Union address in 2003 and was approved by Congress later that year.

At the time, the Bush initiative was overshadowed in the headlines by the nation's focus on Iraq and the economy, despite the fact that the original $15 billion initiative was the largest commitment ever by any nation for a global battle against a single disease.

Five years later, the new initiative is again overshadowed, and again by the focus on the economy and Iraq.

And — for Bush, at least — that is a shame.

In 2003, just 50,000 of the millions of people infected with the AIDS virus in all of sub-Saharan Africa were receiving life-saving antiretroviral drugs. Today, 1.7 million Africans are receiving the drugs, and the program is supporting care for nearly 7 million, including 2.7 million children orphaned by AIDS. In Haiti, one of the poorest nations on the planet, barely 100 people were receiving the drugs in 2003; now 13,000 are treated.

With less than six months remaining in the Bush presidency, the rest of his legacy remains at best cloudy. But the impressive results of his battle against the scourge of AIDS cannot be denied. Its impact, in real lives saved, will be felt for many years to come.

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