UN News Wire
Headline: World Bank, WHO Launch $9.3 Billion Global
Initiative
Date: 24 October 2001
With the goal of creating a tuberculosis-free world in 50 years, the Stop TB Partnership, a project of the World Health Organization, the World Bank, Partners in Health and the Open Society Institute, yesterday officially unveiled a five-year, $9.3 billion global plan to stop the disease's rapid spread across the planet.
"The overriding principle of the plan is to communicate this one simple message: We can control TB," WHO Director General Gro Harlem Brundtland said at a Washington press conference. "It will grant hundreds of thousands of people with TB the measures needed to fight this curable illness," she said, calling the global burden of TB "immense." According to Brundtland, TB each year affects 8 million people and kills 2 million, "even though there is a simple, cost-effective intervention cure that has been available for decades."
Brundtland said that in the past 18 months, almost all of the 22 countries that account for 80 percent of tuberculosis cases have developed comprehensive national plans to fight the disease -- plans that will be an "integral" part of the Global Plan to Stop TB. These countries "will provide their share," she said, calling for a "major injection of development aid" to achieve the plan's goals in light of the current $4.5 billion funding gap.
With the tuberculosis rate increasing in industrialized countries, Brundtland said, "This is not only the right thing to do ... but it is also an act of enlightened self-interest." Billionaire philanthropist and Open Society Institute founder George Soros echoed Brundtland's statements, saying that the $1 billion cost of eradicating an outbreak of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis on New York's Rikers Island justifies the role developed countries have in combating the disease "at its source." He added, "By treating cases now and preventing future transmission of the TB bacillus, countries can avoid much more costly interventions in the future."
According to Joseph Ritzen, a World Bank expert on human development, education and social protection, the bank sees the plan as a "good investment," since "$12 billion is lost to curable TB," and the worldwide campaign is bound to have a "high rate of return" for the bank.
Brundtland emphasized that the plan is separate from the Global AIDS and Health Fund, pointing out, however, that the tuberculosis campaign will be able to draw money from that fund. The comprehensiveness of the anti-tuberculosis plan will also mean that the global fund's money will be more easily targeted and tracked, she added.
Brundtland and Soros both called on developed countries to devote more money to development aid. Singling out the United States, Soros said he is optimistic and pleased with U.S. efforts to pay its U.N. arrears and contribute more aid to global causes, but cited the global target of 0.7 percent of gross domestic product for development aid in saying, "I am very critical of the U.S. for only spending 0.1 percent of its GDP, and I don't think the public is aware of that."
Brundtland was also critical of developed countries. "It's time we talked loudly about an increase in aid," she said. "Somebody needs to raise this important issue." Praising Scandinavian countries for their generous assistance -- they "give, give and give," she said -- the WHO chief said the average level of development assistance for developed countries is only 0.22 percent of GDP. Around $900 million annually "is not a big amount when you look at levels that should be, ought to be, forthcoming," she said.
The Global Plan to Stop TB is aimed at stopping one of the world's deadliest diseases, one that, according to Stop TB, kills 5,000 people daily and is growing at up to 10 percent a year in some regions. A cure has been available for over 50 years at a cost of only $10 per patient.
In developing countries, tuberculosis is ravaging the most economically active segment of the population. Of the 2 million dying annually of the disease, 75 percent are between the ages of 15 and 54. The disease has greatly reduced the life spans of women in affected countries, and every year, more women die from tuberculosis than from all maternal mortality causes combined, according to the global plan.
The four main objectives of the plan are:
The Stop TB Partnership includes more than 100 organizations (Scott Hartmann, UN Wire, Oct. 24).
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