On the eve of George W. Bush's trip to India this week, actor Richard Gere praised the president's commitment to fighting HIV/AIDS. "There's not been a president who has taken this subject more seriously than our current president, and I don't agree with him on very many things, but I can certainly praise him on this," Gere said Sunday on ABC's "This Week" program. "We're talking about a country of a billion people," Gere said of India. "It could be 20 million people die in that country unless we do something very quickly." Gere continued: "The entire continent of Africa is essentially lost as a productive community because no one cared about it. Now we're talking about a population in India that is close to a billion people. If this crisis hits them to the degree it's expected to, we've lost Asia." While analysts expect Bush's discussions to be dominated by national security and nuclear issues, Gere said, "On the scale of things on this planet, terrorism is very small. The money spent on HIV/AIDS comes back to us a million-fold."

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