The New York Times, by Celia W. Dugger, September 7, 2007

Bill Frist, the Tennessee Republican who retired this year as Senate majority leader, announced yesterday that he would lead a drive by the charity Save the Children to make the preventable deaths of millions of children in the developing world an issue for Americans.

Mr. Frist, a surgeon, helped push through large increases in federal spending on another global health issue, AIDS, during his years in Congress.

Advocates for children are now trying to emulate the success of AIDS advocates in winning more federal money. Charles F. MacCormack, president of Save the Children, one of the world's largest aid groups, said he watched in awe over the years as the rock star Bono built bipartisan support on debt relief and global AIDS, winning over powerful elected officials, including some like Jesse Helms, the former Republican senator from North Carolina, who were hostile to foreign aid.

Save the Children hopes Mr. Frist will open doors, and it is still in the process of recruiting senior Democratic leaders, to make its appeal bipartisan.

"The children and mothers who die are in huts beyond the end of pathways with no direct access to political or media leaders," Mr. MacCormack said. "We need people who can walk into prime ministers' and presidents' offices."

Mr. Frist is also involved in a related effort.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has given $22 million to the One Campaign, of which Bono is a founder, with the aim of focusing the attention of presidential candidates on a range of international development issues, including child survival. It has called this effort One Vote '08, and Mr. Frist, who himself decided against running for president this year, is leading it with another former Senate majority leader, Tom Daschle, Democrat of South Dakota.

While federal spending on AIDS globally has almost quadrupled over the past five years, advocates for children have been frustrated by stagnancy in spending on many of the common childhood illnesses that were long ago conquered in rich countries. Millions of newborns, babies and toddlers in poor countries die each year of pneumonia, diarrhea and other ailments that can be cheaply prevented or treated. "We have tools that are inexpensive, reproducible and proven, yet they're not being applied," Mr. Frist said.

In an interview, he said he had made the case for investing more on maternal and child health in recent conversations with some Republican presidential candidates: Mike Huckabee, Sam Brownback, Fred D. Thompson and Mitt Romney.

Mr. Frist, who will teach a course on global health this year at Princeton University, said he planned to devote the next decade of his life to improving the survival odds of children and mothers in the developing world, joining other retired politicians working on global health. Former President Bill Clinton has taken on AIDS, while former President Jimmy Carter has long battled neglected tropical diseases.

Having left the Senate only in January, Mr. Frist is not yet allowed to lobby members of Congress to support the Global Child Survival Act, a bill introduced this year that would sharply increase spending on the problem. But the One Campaign has mobilized. More than 150,000 of its supporters have written letters to members of Congress, encouraging them to vote for the bill, which has sponsors from both parties.

The measure proposes increasing the budget of the United States Agency for International Development for child and maternal health to $600 million next year and $1.6 billion by 2011, from $356 million this year.

The amounts being considered in the appropriations process are much lower. The Bush administration proposed $345 million. The House version of the bill countered with $374 million, while the Senate bill offered $450 million.

Like Save the Children, the Gates Foundation has also turned to political advocacy, wading into a presidential campaign this year for the first time with its grant to the One Campaign. Melinda Gates, who has taken a particular interest in preventing the deaths of millions of newborns each year, said in an interview that the foundation's pockets were not deep enough to do all that must be done. Federal support is needed.

"The inequalities we want to tackle take governments," she said. "There's no way we with our $30 billion could begin to tackle these problems alone."

From The New York Times, September 7, 2007 © 2007 The New York Times All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of the Material without express written permission is prohibited. www.nytimes.com