Former President Bill Clinton said he hopes to use his foundation to treat at least 700,000 AIDS patients in Africa and the Caribbean -- and possibly many more -- during the next five years. "Nothing would please me more than if instead of 700,000 or 800,000 we have 8 million within a couple of years," Clinton said Monday. "But in order to do it we not only have to have the money and the availability of the medicine, we have to have the infrastructure."

The William J. Clinton Presidential Foundation is working with the governments of Rwanda, Mozambique, Tanzania and several Caribbean nations to fund AIDS prevention and treatment. Clinton said he hopes the foundation can develop an AIDS treatment and prevention model that can be exported to other countries such as India and the republics of the former Soviet Union. Foundation officials were able to cut the cost of life-prolonging antiretroviral drugs from $3,500 a year to $500 a year in the Bahamas by negotiating directly with drug suppliers, Clinton said.

Clinton, who announced his foundation's AIDS initiative last July, was joined by former presidential adviser Ira Magaziner, chair of the initiative, for a briefing at the former president's office in Harlem. "By and large, particularly in the Caribbean and in Africa, there's not much denial anymore," Clinton said. "They want to do the right thing. There's an openness to making these changes and cooperation at the local level that you didn't see four or five years ago."

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