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— A global group funding the battle against AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis in impoverished countries urged wealthy nations on Wednesday to keep paying for the fight even as the economic crisis forces budget cuts.
Michel Kazatchkine, executive director of the Geneva-based Global Fund, said he hoped to win pledges of up to $20 billion over the next three years from national governments, but he was concerned that the global economic meltdown could make rich countries scale back their contributions.
More than 95 percent of the fund's resources comes from countries' foreign aid budgets. Pledges for the next three-year period will be made at an Oct. 5 conference at U.N. headquarters.
"The preliminary contacts we have been having with capitals particularly in Europe are that budgets will be tight, and when budgets are tight (aid) is often paying the price," Kazatchkine said.
He said the fund's success against the killer diseases since its launch eight years ago has shown it is saving millions of lives.
"I feel the results we are presenting are just incredible," he told The Associated Press at a conference in The Hague.
The Global Fund now helps pay for AIDS treatment for 2.5 million people. A pledge of $20 million would lift that figure to 7.5 million, he said.
In 2007, the group trumpeted its distribution of 18 million anti-malaria mosquito nets. The number has since risen to 105 million and the fund is now aiming for distributing 250 million nets.
He said the fund also aims to reduce the prevalence of tuberculosis to 124 out of every 100,000 people in 2015, from 164 now, although he said the world was "clearly off track" in its fight against drug-resistant tuberculosis.
There are nearly 9 million new cases of TB worldwide and the disease kills more than 1.5 million people every year, according to the World Health Organization.
TB can be cured with a six-month course of antibiotics that costs only $20, but WHO said about 4 percent of all TB cases worldwide are thought to be non-responsive to the usual drugs.
Michel Sidibe, head of the U.N. AIDS program, warned Wednesday that double infections of HIV and TB could become the next new epidemic.
A person whose immune system is compromised by HIV is particularly susceptible to tuberculosis, which is caused by bacteria that usually attack the lungs. The disease is spread through the air when an infected person coughs or sneezes.
"I'm calling for serious attention to TB, and serious attention to TB-HIV co-infection," Sidibe said in the African nation of Lesotho as he marked World TB Day.
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Associated Press writer Nastasya Tay contributed to this report from Morija, Lesotho.
