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Funding shortage
hinders g "The U.S., like every other
donor, will need to do more if the world is to respond effectively
to AIDS," Congress was told last month by Peter Piot,
executive director of UNAIDS, the joint United Nations program on
HIV/AIDS that is fighting the worldwide pandemic. "We are currently far from
having secured the $10 billion required for a comprehensive response
in the world's Sixty million people have been
infected with AIDS since it was discovered in the early 1980s, and
20 million have died, he said. Life expectancy in sub-Saharan There are 14 million orphans who
have become "desperate and easy prey for militias and war The shortage in expected funding
comes despite major changes in the way foreign aid for health is
delivered, officials say. New, transparent and effective
ways to avoid corruption and deliver aid were devised, in part because
of the demands by conservative Republicans who took over Congress
in 1994 and called for accountability in foreign aid, said one health
official, who asked not to be identified. The business savvy of new billionaire
donors such as Microsoft's Bill Gates and media mogul Ted Turner
as well as health foundations also spurred reforms in health aid,
said Kraig Klaudt, a senior World Health
Organization (WHO) adviser in Changes included "leapfrogging"
ineffective governments and cutting off funds to ineffective or
corrupt health ministries and instead giving aid directly to nongovernmental
organizations, businesses or private civil-society groups. India, for example, recently was
denied a huge health grant because it failed to produce a plan to
increase the use of the latest technique in fighting the spread
of tubercu But while "the stage was set"
by these reforms for a huge assault on the biggest killers of mankind,
the G "We need to see a roughly
50 percent increase in funding each year, in each of the next four
years," Mr. Piot told the Foreign
Relations Committee. Last year, U.N. Secretary-General
Kofi Annan and
Gro Harlem Brundtland,
a physician and former prime minister of Norway appointed director-general
of the WHO in 1998, initiated the G In 2001, TB killed 1.66 million,
malaria killed 1.08 million and AIDS killed 2.94 million, the WHO
reported. The battle against AIDS won a powerful
ally last year when Secretary of State Colin L. Powell visited Mr. Powell and his wife visited
Africans infected with HIV and heard them describe their struggle
to obtain anti-AIDS drugs and to cope with ostracism, declining
health and the lack of adequate prevention or health measures. Despite that up-c The administrator of the U.S. Agency
for International Deve "This does not count additional
funds that other branches of the Mr. Natsios
also said last month that "our annual condom distribution and
social marketing activities probably avert a half a million infections
every year." But days later, Mr. Powell's MTV
message advocating condom use to fight AIDS stirred up conservative
critics who favor only abstinence to prevent the sexual transmission
of HIV. Mr. Natsios
went a step further and told the Senate committee: "We are
also in the process of creating a central condom fund to consolidate
our acquisition, save money and get them to the field more quickly.
This should al He said the Meanwhile, health officials continue
to hone their plans to deliver aid and to ensure that corrupt governments
don't simply slash their health budgets when foreign help arrives.
Thomas Schoenemann,
managing director of Medvantis, a private
health-management firm of the bank Credit Suisse, which is the first
private firm to donate to the G Speaking by phone from The new health aid also requires
that But like other health officials,
Mr. Schoenemann stressed the need for
donations. "We need to mobilize resources
needed to stop these killer diseases," he said.
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