The House will take up and clear the Senate version of global AIDS legislation as soon as next week, paving the way for President Bush to sign the measure, leaders said Thursday.

The Senate passed its bill Wednesday by 80-16. The measure would authorize $48 billion over the next five years to fight AIDS and other diseases overseas.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee said it would accept the Senate version. The House on April 2 passed its own bill by 308-116.

Bush, who championed the original law in 2003 and pushed for reauthorization this year, is expected to sign the legislation.

The largest difference between the House and Senate bills is their price tags. Both would authorize $50 billion, but with an amendment adopted Wednesday the Senate diverted $2 billion to American Indian health care, law enforcement and clean water programs.

The 2003 law authorized $15 billion for the program’s first five years; Congress subsequently provided about $19 billion. Bush had requested a $30 billion reauthorization, but signed on to the $50 billion number in a bipartisan compromise that was struck in February.

The Senate bill also lacks some of the spending mandates in the House bill, which would require 20 percent of the money to go to HIV prevention activities.

The Senate bill would require that more than half of the program’s bilateral aid go toward AIDS treatment and care — a provision missing from the House bill and inserted into the Senate version at the insistence of Tom Coburn, R-Okla.

The House bill would authorize family planning groups to provide education, testing and condoms; the Senate bill avoided the debate altogether. Conservatives contend that could link the program to abortion.

The Senate bill would repeal a ban on HIV-positive visitors to the United States. The ban has been in place since 1987 and the United States is one of only 12 countries that still have such a law.