Latest news with #GlobalFundtoFightAIDS
The Star
18 hours ago
- Health
- The Star
Lenacapavir: A game changer for HIV prevention in South Africa
"This is a game changer for South Africa," said Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi as T he Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria on Wednesday secured access to breakthrough HIV prevention for low and middle income countries. "Lenacapavir offers young women, and everyone at risk, a discreet, long-acting option to stay HIV-free. " For far too long, women and girls in our country have carried the greatest burden of this epidemic. "But scientific breakthroughs must be backed by political will, community leadership, and sustained investment. We are determined to ensure no one is left behind.' The deal signed between with US pharmaceutical giant Gilead and the Global Fund will mean lower-income countries will gain access to a the HIV prevention drug at the same time as in high-income countries. There was particular urgency in countries like South Africa, where adolescent girls and young women are disproportionately affected by HIV. The Global Fund said it hoped the agreement with Gilead would make it possible to reach two million people with the drug, which was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration last month. Drugs to prevent HIV transmission, known as pre-exposure prophylaxis or PrEP, have existed for more than a decade. But because they typically require taking a daily pill, they have yet to make a significant dent in global infections.
Global News
3 days ago
- Health
- Global News
Canada must renew support to fight AIDS, TB abroad, advocates urge
AIDS activists are urging the federal government to quickly renew Canada's support for fighting infectious diseases abroad, warning delays will further hinder global efforts to combat key illnesses. 'While some of the other nations around the world are retreating right now from investing in global health, Canada can and should be stepping forward swiftly, to save lives,' said Justin McAuley, a director with the Canadian branch of the ONE Campaign. His group is among 24 Canadian civil society organizations that asked the government to allocate $1.37 billion over three years for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. The fund is affiliated with the United Nations, and it supports developing countries in limiting and treating the three preventable illnesses, which in many regions are among the leading causes of death. Story continues below advertisement Canada is one of the world's top supporters of the fund, which makes up the largest chunk of Ottawa's global health spending. Canada has contributed nearly $5 billion to the Global Fund since 2002, and the fund estimates it has saved 65 million lives in that time. Countries replenish the fund every three years, with their contributions usually rising over time as health-care systems build more capacity to treat and prevent these diseases. In each cycle, civil society groups issue what they call a fair-share metric to reflect how much each wealthy country can reasonably pledge to help the fund reach its goals. 2:38 Risk of 2,000 new HIV infections daily after US aid freeze, UN AIDS agency estimates The office of Randeep Sarai, secretary of state for international development, referred questions about the $1.37 billion request to Global Affairs Canada. Get weekly health news Receive the latest medical news and health information delivered to you every Sunday. Sign up for weekly health newsletter Sign Up By providing your email address, you have read and agree to Global News' Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy 'Canada looks forward to working together as part of the Global Fund partnership to secure a successful eighth replenishment of the fund this year,' the department wrote in a statement. 'Discussions regarding Canada's pledge are ongoing.' Story continues below advertisement McAuley said he hopes Ottawa announces its pledge soon, to build momentum for other countries to follow suit. 'Canada has a unique role and legacy to play in the global health space,' he said. 'Our momentum will mean something on the world stage — if we come out early, and don't wait for the last minute.' Results Canada, another group asking Ottawa to meet the civil society target, noted the G7 summit that Canada hosted in Alberta 'focused on trade, conflict and climate — but overlooked two of the most powerful tools for global stability: health and education.' That has put the legacy of the Global Fund 'under threat,' the group argued in an email campaign. 'As countries cut international assistance, decades of hard-won gains hang in the balance.' UNAIDS reported on July 10 that HIV infections and deaths continue to drop, but sudden cuts by the United States and others 'threaten to reverse years of progress in the response to HIV.' U.S. Republicans recently reversed plans to cut PEPFAR, the world's largest HIV program, but Washington is still on track to slash its contribution to the Global Fund. 2:11 USAID cuts: South Africa-led HIV vaccine development comes to a halt Countries normally make pledges at an organized conference, such as the last cycle when prime minister Justin Trudeau visited the United Nations in New York in 2022. Story continues below advertisement This year, there is no pledging conference, though McAuley expects leaders of large economies to make pledges before visiting South Africa for the G20 summit in November. He said global health is already under pressure from armed conflicts, climate-related events and the ongoing recovery of health systems from cutbacks during the COVID-19 pandemic. Rich countries are cutting back on foreign aid as they increase military spending. Prime Minister Mark Carney promised in last spring's election to not cut foreign aid spending or development financing, though this was before he launched a review of government spending and committed to large amounts of military-related spending. McAuley said Carney ought to meet the metric outlined by civil society, or he'll be offside with his two last predecessors. 'Both Harper and Trudeau repeatedly stepped up and did Canada's fair share,' he said. 'Is Carney going to break that pattern now and step back?'
New York Times
14-05-2025
- Business
- New York Times
The Boom Years of Global Charity Are Over. What Comes Next?
Will anyone ever give like this again? When Bill and Melinda French Gates established their world-shaping Gates Foundation in 2000, you could say it marked the peak of a certain era of starry-eyed optimism among the world's private-jet elite. This month, when Bill Gates celebrated the foundation's 25th anniversary by announcing he was putting it on a glide path to closing, he pledged that he would be spending even more aggressively, distributing 99 percent of his astronomical wealth in just two decades. But the announcement looked nevertheless like a turning of the page, even a passing of the baton. I spoke with Gates about the decision over two days last month outside Palm Springs, Calif., and to me it felt like a trip in a time machine to a throwback era not so distant in years but disorientingly foreign in mood. Sometimes called the end of history, sometimes the time of globalization and sometimes the age of neoliberalism, that era was defined by new levels of extreme wealth, technocratic confidence in the human capacity to transform the world and a somewhat miraculous — and often underappreciated — wave of improvements in the lives of the least well off. One benefit of truly extreme wealth is that it allows one to sail into the future somewhat unperturbed by the choppiness of the cultural waters. But for someone tallying the achievements of a generation of global giving, it is hard not to worry about the direction of change and the way the winds are blowing. There were blind spots to that old worldview, to be sure, not to mention missteps and blunders when its evangelists brought the new developmental gospel to the front lines. In 2018, an evaluation determined that one of the Gates Foundation's central educational initiatives had been a failure — perhaps a sobering sign for future endeavors focused on artificial intelligence in schools. In 2021, the foundation funded an audit that concluded that its agricultural initiatives in Africa had been a mixed bag — a gentler critique than those that advocates on the ground had been making for years, both on the basis of limited returns and in explicitly anticolonialist terms. In the midst of the pandemic, Gates argued against releasing intellectual property to accelerate the global distribution of Covid shots, leaving shortfalls in the global south, which critics there called 'vaccine apartheid.' But the period also produced enormous dividends: huge improvements in extreme poverty globally, as well as maternal mortality and childhood death rates, to name just a few metrics. Western philanthropy was far from the sole driver of these gains; a large part of the poverty reduction, especially, took place in China. And yet just through its work with Gavi and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, two programs it also helped establish, the Gates Foundation has a plausible claim to helping save more than 80 million lives. That is an absolutely staggering achievement, one that places the Gateses in the philanthropic pantheon right next to the robber barons whose Gilded Age giving first inspired them. Not everyone saw this work as charitably as did globalization's leadership class, who sometimes cheered development philanthropies as a way of affirming the justice of a world system on whose top they proudly sat. After all, even as extreme poverty fell by three-quarters in what were often called the miraculous decades of the 1990s and the 2000s, the wealth gap between the world's poorest and the world's richest didn't decline; it ballooned, with the income gains flooding to the globe's top 10 percent hundreds of times as large as those going to the bottom 10 percent. As skeptics of foreign aid have been pointing out for quite a while, adjusted for inflation, the average income in sub-Saharan Africa has barely grown since 1970 — more than 50 years and several distinct lost decades ago. Developmental aid has probably produced as many cautionary tales as economic boom success stories, and to bring all the world's people out of poverty, the World Bank recently estimated, would take more than a century; to bring them up to the poverty level of rich nations would take far longer. 'G.D.P. is magic stuff,' Gates told me. 'But you also want your interventions to help out even before that growth kicks in.' And they have: Rates of childhood death and maternal mortality remain much higher among the world's poor than the world's rich, but each has also been cut roughly in half in just a few decades. Smallpox has been eradicated globally, and Guinea worm and polio appear to be on their way out. This isn't the work of one man or one couple or one foundation, however large. But that one foundation and its billions of dollars have played an outsize role. A decade ago, it would have been easy to look at those improvements and trust that the trends would continue wherever the growth rates or political currents went — the project of global health so deeply embedded in international institutions that it had begun to seem almost like the basic compensatory infrastructure of an outrageously unequal world. Today, it's less clear how interested the world's richest are in offering such compensation, with that infrastructure looking much less secure as a result. President George W. Bush's PEPFAR program to deliver H.I.V. treatment globally has been credited with saving an estimated 25 million lives, but instead of confirming its value beyond any public doubt, the opposite seems to have happened. In just a few months, the Trump administration's attack on U.S. foreign aid has already been blamed, by some trackers, for the needless deaths of more than 200,000 people abroad. In 2021, JD Vance called the Gates Foundation and its breed 'cancers on American society,' and Stephen Miller, a top adviser to President Trump, has criticized it for promoting 'the most hateful, toxic and Marxist ideologies.' You can even see some Trump-y accelerationist types mocking Gates online for having sold so much of his Microsoft stock, because holding onto it over the decades would have meant that he never had to relinquish the title of world's richest man — as though wealth itself would have been a more lasting monument than the millions of lives he saved. And what of global health? Last year, acknowledging that the boom years for progress had ended, Gates wondered publicly how long the slowdown would last. Now he describes his speed-run approach less in the language of shortfalls or crises than through the logic of opportunity. Others at the foundation talk in terms of imagining a future in which, by making enough progress toward its headline targets, the organization could also make itself unnecessary. Many in the developing world would like to imagine that, too, some of them for somewhat different reasons. But in the near term, the influence of the Gates Foundation isn't heading for a sunset but a sunrise. In recent years, the foundation has been the second largest donor to the World Health Organization. With the United States' withdrawal, it will become the largest single supporter of what is now a much more vulnerable institution. Probably the same pattern will repeat elsewhere: If we are genuinely entering a fallow period, the relative influence of the biggest donors will only grow. Already there are those asking, somewhat in desperation, why Gates isn't doing even more. And the years ahead do look fallow. The United States has been responsible for one-third of all funding for global health, and the cuts to basic science and R. & D. may prove just as gutting. For decades now, money flowed from the world's rich to the world's poor partly to meet fundamental needs that could not be met locally, and the world's exploding debt crisis has made the problem only more acute: Forty percent of the planet lives in places that spend more money paying interest on their debts than on health or education; the number of African countries where debts have passed 60 percent of G.D.P. has doubled in a decade; and it costs roughly 10 times as much to borrow money south of the Mediterranean as it does north of the Alps. Violence and warfare have grown globally, particularly across the poorer world, and relatedly, there are now nearly 200 million more people living with food insecurity than before the pandemic. Perhaps it isn't enough to torpedo comforting narratives of global progress or materially undermine all those global health gains. But if it looked for a time as though the turn of the millennium had initiated a new phase of developmental history, it's a lot less clear where things are heading next.
Arab Times
08-03-2025
- Health
- Arab Times
Kuwait leads MENA region in achieving 90-90-90 HIV targets: UN
GENEVA, March 8: Kuwait's permanent delegation to Geneva highlighted the country's significant progress in combating the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) at the national level, according to United Nations reports. This success is largely attributed to the expansion of free, confidential voluntary testing and the provision of preventive treatments both before and after exposure to infection. The statement was delivered by Diplomatic Attaché Sarah Al-Hasawi on behalf of the State of Kuwait at the 58th session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva, during a panel discussion on combating HIV. Al-Hasawi outlined that Kuwait has led the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region in achieving the 90-90-90 targets. These indicators mean that 90% of people living with HIV are aware of their infection, 90% of those diagnosed are receiving antiretroviral treatment, and 90% of those receiving treatment have an undetectable viral load in their blood. She also emphasized that Kuwait is making steady progress toward the next goal, the 95-95-95 indicators, as part of its national strategy to combat AIDS. Additionally, Al-Hasawi noted that Kuwait has allowed the employment of individuals living with HIV in jobs that do not pose a risk to their health or others, ensuring their full integration into society. She stressed that Kuwait has adopted premarital medical examinations as part of its strategy to enhance health prevention. The country continues to implement widespread awareness campaigns to fight social stigma and encourage individuals to get tested, particularly in schools and universities, to promote effective prevention efforts. On the international front, Al-Hasawi highlighted Kuwait's ongoing support for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, with contributions totaling $27 million over the past 20 years. These funds have been crucial in ensuring equitable access to treatment and supporting the global effort to eliminate AIDS by 2030. In conclusion, Al-Hasawi reaffirmed Kuwait's commitment to the belief that the right to health is a fundamental human right. She emphasized that combating the HIV/AIDS epidemic requires non-discrimination, the preservation of dignity, and the protection of the privacy of those infected. Furthermore, she called for a unified global response to tackle the virus comprehensively.
Bloomberg
18-02-2025
- Health
- Bloomberg
Global Fund Seeks $18 Billion as US Retreats From Public Health
Financing for global health has never looked more dire as the world reels from US President Donald Donald Trump's dramatic pullback. Now the biggest funder of programs against HIV, tuberculosis and malaria is looking to the UK and others to urgently raise some $18 billion. A lack of financing could upend a target to end AIDS by 2030 – a goal that's tantalizingly within reach – and threaten many lives, according to the executive director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
