House Subcommittee Markup Leaves Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria...( WASHINGTON June 17 -- The Global Fun...),Health

WASHINGTON, June 17 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria is currently facing a major financing shortfall. While the Foreign Operations subcommittee provided a welcome increase over the President's request, today's markup suggests that the U.S. is going to fall far short of its commitment to fund fully its fair share of the Global Fund's resource needs, while the global economic recession undermines countries' efforts to fight the three diseases.

The lives of about as many people as live in all of Washington, DC are at stake as well as the credibility of the U.S. - which promised the world to support the Global Fund.

The Financial Crisis is already undermining the fight against AIDS. A World Bank report recently detailed how it could place the treatment of more than 1.7 million at risk by year's end. Tanzania announced that it planned to cut its national HIV/AIDS budget by 25 percent, and similar moves by Kenya and Sudan have already caused shortages of medical supplies in some areas.

The House Numbers suggest the U.S. will fall far short of its commitments at exactly the wrong time. The U.S. and all G8 countries committed to scale up the Global Fund to a size of $6 to $8 billion by 2010 in order to reach the global goal of universal access to AIDS treatment, anti-malaria bed nets, and tuberculosis services. Despite these commitments, President Obama failed to request an increase in Global Fund funding, and the House has included only $700 million in its foreign operations subcommittee mark. Combined with the President's budget of $300 million in Labor-HHS, this means flat-funding the Global Fund at the same $1 billion from last year at the very moment when the U.S.' expected contribution should be between $2 and $2.7 billion.

Under a new Congress and Administration - with a commitment to multilateralism -
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