Peter Sands, the executive director of the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, said the combined death toll from the diseases could be halved in the next four years in the countries where the fund invests. Without enough money, Sands warned, governments on the frontline of the fight will be forced to prioritise “basic life-saving essentials” over more sophisticated efforts to curb the diseases once and for all.
However, he said that “extraordinary opportunity” would only be possible with sufficient financial resources to allow badly affected countries to use new scientific tools such as Oxford University’s promising malaria vaccine and a groundbreaking HIV prevention drug developed by a British pharmaceutical company.
Britain has been the third-largest donor to the Global Fund, which provides two-thirds of all international financing for malaria programmes and three-quarters of the money for TB programmes. But at a recent conference aimed at securing the fund’s resources for the next three years, Britain failed to make a pledge. The government has until late October, when the fund will begin the process of allocating its resources to the countries in which it invests.
“The challenge is that if most of the money is just going on delivering … essentials [such as antiretroviral treatment and insecticide-treated bed nets] there’s very little resource to enable the rapid introduction of the newer tools that will actually win against the disease,” Sands explained.
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