LONDONNews (Updated
November 27, 2011)
[Home]
[Previous
news]
By JOHN HEILPRIN,
Associated Press 25 November, 2011
GENEVA (AP) The
world's biggest financier in the fight against three killer diseases says it has
run out of money to pay for new grant programs for the next two years a
situation likely to hit poor AIDS patients around the world.
An official with the
Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria said Thursday that its has
been forced to cease giving new grants until 2014 because of global economic
woes brought on by debt crises in the
An independent panel
recommended in September that the fund must adopt tougher financial safeguards
after it weathered a storm of criticism and doubts among some of its biggest
donors.
The fund created the panel
chaired by former U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt
and ex
The Geneva-based fund was
set up in 2002 as a new way to coordinate world efforts against the diseases and
to speed up emergency funds from wealthy nations and donors to the places
hardest hit. Outside of its donor nations and celebrity backers, the biggest
private donor is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that has pledged $1.15
billion and provided it with $650 million so far.
Since its creation, the
fund, which is strictly a financing tool, has disbursed some $15 billion for
programs $2.8 billion this year alone, including to pay for treatment for
around half the developing world's AIDS sufferers.
With donations now harder
to come by, the fund says it can only afford to keep existing AIDS programs
going, but not expand its services or add new patients.
"We're not cutting
back we're not expanding," the fund's board chairman, Simon Bland, told
The Associated Press from Accra, Ghana, where the board has been meeting this
week.
The fund had to make some
"tough decisions to protect some of the gains that have already been
delivered," he added.
Among those decisions were
that $800 million to $900 million in grants planned for
"It is deeply
worrisome that inadvertently the millions of people fighting with deadly
diseases are in danger of paying the price for the global financial
crisis," the fund's executive director, Dr. Michel Kazatchkine, said in a
statement.
But the fund has $4
billion on hand to meet all of its current commitments and the
"presumption" is that people in
He said the fund's
financing picture for the next two years, however, could affect about 9 to 10
million new patients who are in need of HIV treatment in developing nations.
The board has also decided
to create a new general manager position after the panel found unhealthy
friction between Kazatchkine and the fund's internal watchdog, Inspector General
John Parsons's office, whose teams of auditors and investigators have been
documenting losses.
The fund released 12
reports on its website earlier this month that turned up an additional $20
million of mismanagement, alleged fraud and misspending. Earlier probes had
detected about $53 million in losses, according to fund documents.
Some of the reports have
led to criminal cases, and some countries mirroring the fund's own efforts
say they have begun putting new financial safeguards in place.
Copyright © 2011 The
Associated Press.
Nov 23 2011
By Kate Kelland
LONDON
The move by the Global
Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria takes management responsibility away from
Michel Kazatchkine, currently executive director, and means the fund will make
no new grants or funding until 2014.
Until then, any low and
middle-income countries who have Global Fund grants that expire can apply for
emergency maintenance funding to tide them over, a spokesman said.
"Substantial budget
challenges in some donor countries, compounded by low interest rates, have
significantly affected the resources available for new grant funding," the
Global Fund said in a statement after its board met in
"As a result, the
Global Fund will only be able to finance essential services for on-going
programs that come to their conclusion before 2014."
The public-private Global
Fund, based in Geneva, accounts for around a quarter of international financing
to fight HIV and AIDS, as well as the majority of funds to fight TB and malaria.
Founded in 2002, it raises money from donors every three years.
To date, it has committed
$22.4 billion in 150 countries to support large-scale prevention, treatment and
care programs against the three diseases. But in recent years it has struggled
to persuade international donors to pledge enough money for its work, and has
faced accusations of lax regulation of money.
The Fund commissioned a
review of its procedures in March after reporting "grave misuse of
funds" in four recipient nations, a move that prompted some donors such as
Among other
recommendations, the review committee said the Global Fund should adopt a risk
management approach to financing program which would take proper account of
which countries could be most trusted with its money.
In Wednesday's statement,
the Fund said a new general manager would now be appointed "to work
alongside the executive director" and help "take the organization
through its transformation phase over the next twelve months."
A spokesman said a
decision on this post would be taken "fairly quickly" and the person
appointed would be a "tried and tested manager with a background in this
sort of work."
"It's an
all-absorbing job, and frankly for the executive director to do this alongside
his other roles would be very challenging," spokesman Andrew Hurst told
Reuters.
At its last fund-raising
conference in 2010, the Global Fund failed to secure the $13 billion minimum it
said it needed to sustain the global fight against the three killer diseases.
The $11.5 billion in
pledges it did win was also way below the $20 billion it had asked for to be
able to scale up its efforts in the hardest-hit countries.
The international medical
charity Medecins Sans Frontieres said it was concerned about the Global Fund's
unprecedented decision to cut new grants, especially at a time when latest data
on HIV and AIDS are suggesting that getting AIDS drugs to more people earlier
could turn the epidemic around.
"There's a shocking
incongruence between both the new HIV science and political promises on one
hand, and the funding reality that is now hitting the ground on the other,"
said MSF's Tido von Schoen-Angerer. "Donors are really pulling the rug out
from under people living with HIV/AIDS at precisely the time when we need to
move full steam ahead."
In its latest report
Monday, the director of the United Nations AIDS program said the past 12 months
had been a "game-changing year" in the fight against the pandemic and
voiced optimism that life-saving AIDS treatment is starting to bring down the
rate of new infections. [ID:nL5E7ML10P]
(Reporting by Kate
Kelland; Editing by Janet Lawrence)
By Kate Kelland
LONDON
(Reuters) - More people than ever are living with the AIDS virus but this is
largely due to better access to drugs that keep HIV patients alive and well for
many years, the United Nations AIDS programme (UNAIDS) said on Monday.
In its annual report on
the pandemic, UNAIDS said the number of people dying of the disease fell to 1.8
million in 2010, down from a peak of 2.2 million in the mid-2000s.
UNAIDS director Michel
Sidibe said the past 12 months had been a "game-changing year" in the
global AIDS fight.
About 2.5 million deaths
have been averted in poor and middle-income countries since 1995 due to AIDS
drugs being introduced and access to them improving, according to UNAIDS.
Much of that success has
come in the past two years as the numbers of people getting treatment has
increased rapidly.
"We've never had a
year when there has been so much science, so much leadership and such results in
one year," Sidibe said in a telephone interview from UNAIDS in Geneva.
"Even in this time of
public finance crises and uncertainty about funding, we're seeing results. We
are seeing more countries than ever before (achieving) significant reductions in
new infections and stabilising their epidemics."
Since the beginning of the
AIDS pandemic in the 1980s, more than 60 million people have been infected with
the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS. HIV can be controlled
for many years with cocktails of drugs, but there is as yet no cure.
TREATMENT FOR PREVENTION
The UNAIDS report said 34
million people around the world had HIV in 2010, up from 33.3 million in 2009.
Among the most dramatic
changes was the leap in the number of people getting treatment with AIDS drugs
when they need it.
Of the 14.2 million people
eligible for treatment in low- and middle-income countries, around 6.6 million,
or 47 percent, are now receiving it, UNAIDS said, and 11 poor- and mid-income
countries now have universal access to HIV treatment, with coverage of 80
percent or more.
This compares with 36
percent of the 15 million people needing treatment in 2009 who got AIDS drugs.
"In just one year we
have added 1.4 million people to treatment," said Adrian Lovett of the
anti-poverty campaign group ONE. He said the figures showed "huge
progress" but also underlined "the major push needed now in order to
turn the corner in this epidemic".
Major producers of HIV
drugs include
A series of scientific
studies have shown that getting timely treatment to those with HIV can
substantially cut the number of people who become newly infected with the virus.
Sidibe said this was
starting to show in new case numbers.
There were 2.7 million new
HIV infections worldwide in 2010, 15 percent fewer than in 2001, and 21 percent
below the number of new infections at the peak of the epidemic in 1997.
"The big point for us
is the number of new infections --that's where you win against the
epidemic," Sidibe said.
Medical charity Medecins
Sans Frontieres (MSF) said the growing number of averted AIDS deaths was
important progress. However, it added that the number of people on treatment
needed to increase dramatically to reap the benefits of science.
"Never, in more than
a decade of treating people living with HIV/AIDS, have we been at such a
promising moment to really turn this epidemic around," said MSF's Tido von
Schoen-Angerer.
"Governments in some
of the hardest hit countries want to act on the science, seize this moment and
reverse the AIDS epidemic. But this means nothing if there is no money to make
it happen."
Despite progress on HIV
treatment and prevention, sub-Saharan Africa is still by far the worst hit area,
accounting for 68 percent of all those living with HIV in 2010 despite its
population accounting for only 12 percent of the global total.
Around 70 percent of new
HIV infections in 2010, and almost half of all AIDS-related deaths, were in
sub-Saharan
Sidibe said that with many
international donor countries struggling with slow economic growth and high
debt, the global AIDS fight had to become even more focused on high impact
interventions to deliver progress in the places worst hit.
"We need to maintain
our investment, but ... in a smarter way. "Then we'll see a serious decline
in the epidemic," he said.
(Reporting by Kate
Kelland; Editing by Janet Lawrence and David Stamp)