About $10.5 billion will be needed by 2005 for HIV/AIDS prevention, care and support programmes in low- and middle-income countries, rising to $15 billion two years later, two United Nations agencies said today in a revised report on the global response to the epidemic.
According to the study, released by the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and the UN World Health Organization (WHO) on the eve of the board meeting of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, funding for next year would have to double to $6.5 billion from the present figure of about $3 billion.
The organizations say the new estimates took into account declines in the price of anti-retroviral drugs used to delay the onset of AIDS, and the inclusion of three additional interventions to the 22 included in the original estimates.
The interventions are universal precautions to prevent HIV transmission in health care settings, treatment for health care workers who had been exposed to HIV/AIDS and the use of safe needles for all medical injections.
Prepared by a working group of the UNAIDS Economics Reference Group, the revised estimates reinforce the call by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to increase spending on AIDS to around $10 billion a year by 2005, the agencies say.
Initiated in April 2001 by Mr. Annan as the primary financier of public health interventions in developing countries, the Fund has already attracted $2 billion in pledges. But UNAIDS and WHO say substantial increases in expenditures was needed from government, bilateral and multilateral agencies, non-governmental organizations and the private sector in order to keep pace with the epidemic's rapid expansion.
Of the 40 million people around the world who live with HIV/AIDS, close to 30 million are in Africa, 7.6 million in Asia and 1.5 million in Latin America, according to UNAIDS. Last year, three million people died of AIDS and 5 million new infections were recorded.