Category Archives: News

HNA Group first Chinese private sector donor to contribute to UNITAID

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PARIS, France. December 13, 2011 Air-transport conglomerate HNA Group Co., Ltd has become the first Chinese company to support UNITAID’s innovative work to fight HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis after signing a partnership agreement today with the Millennium Foundation. As global health funding flatlines in a difficult economic environment, this commitment from the largest private airline company in China is a promising development in getting emerging market private sector players involved in fighting global poverty.

To kick-off this partnership, HNA Group has announced an initial donation of EUR 600,000 (USD 800,000) through its charitable foundation, the Hainan Province Cihang Foundation, to help UNITAID boost market availability of affordable medicines and diagnostics for HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria. Another such donation will be made in 2012.

“We have decided to support one of the world’s leading global public health initiatives because of its innovative way of using the power of markets to deliver treatments and tests around the world,” said Chen Feng, Chairman of the Board of Directors of HNA Group. “China is playing a larger role in financing the fight against global poverty and we look forward to working with UNITAID and the Millennium Foundation to bring our country’s private sector resources to bear in the fight against HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis.”

Until now, UNITAID has raised $1.3 billion through a small air levy in several countries, including France and five sub-Saharan African countries. The Millennium Foundation’s working partnership with HNA Group is another step for UNITAID in finding innovative sources of funds for global health – this time in powerful emerging donor markets like China.

“In a resource-strained environment for global health, UNITAID is a leader in innovative thinking on how we can fund the fight against HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria,” said Philippe Douste-Blazy, Chairman of UNITAID and the Millennium Foundation. “There have been repeated calls for China to get involved as a stakeholder in global health and I’m excited that the Millennium Foundation will be working with HNA Group in this important new area of global health financing.”

UNITAID was launched in September 2006 by the Governments of Brazil, Chile, France, Norway and the United Kingdom. Today it is supported by 29 countries and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Eight of out ten HIV-positive children in developing countries have a future thanks to UNITAID’s work in creating a sustainable market for paediatric HIV/AIDS medicines. Equal successes have been achieved for malaria and tuberculosis medicines throughout the world.

Since 2006, UNITAID, through its partners, has funded projects for the provision of medicines to treat, diagnose and prevent HIV and Malaria in China at a value of approximately US$ 7.4 million.

ACTE raises $100,000 for the Millennium Foundation!

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The Association of Corporate Travel Executives (ACTE) has raised a record breaking $100,000 at their annual Gala Rouge & Noir in Paris this October to be split between the Millennium Foundation and the ACTE Centre.

The event was the culmination of three successful days of networking and educational sessions at ACTE’s Global European Conference in Paris. ACTE, a leading non‐profit organization that serves the global business travel industry, brought together a record 1000 senior-level delegates at this year’s conference.

The black tie gala saw 150 influential executives from the global travel industry, from countries as widespread as Brazil, South Africa, Canada and Spain meet at the Les Pavillons de Bercy, an enchanting venue in the heart of Paris, packed full of fun-fair themed art dating back to the 18th century.

The money was raised in imaginative ways throughout the evening. Guests were invited to pay €33.30 for one of 50 “Random ACTE’s of Kindness” a collection of mystery prices ranging in value from €50 – €600 that included everything from an I-Pad to a year’s free ACTE membership! Next up were the ‘walking sandwich boards’ where a number of ACTE staff encouraged individuals to bid for some outstanding prizes including O2 Area Box Seats and Weekend Getaways to San Francisco, San Diego and more in an auction with a difference.

Peter Curtis, Head of Partnerships for the  Millennium Foundation took to the stage to talk about how the travel industry has united behind projects like MASSIVEGOOD to make a difference in global health.

Donations from the Rouge and Noir Gala will be used to fight HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis through UNITAID, a drug-purchasing organization hosted by the World Health Organization. Three out of four children on HIV treatment globally are able to survive thanks to UNITAID funds.

To join ACTE, or for more information, visit www.acte.org

UN Week Roundup

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This month is always a boom time for eye-opening reports on the state of global poverty, as world leaders gather in New York for the annual United Nations General Assembly. Activists, researchers, development officials and everyone concerned with improving the state of the world’s poor all chime in to convince leaders to act. Yet it can be a daunting task to sort through both the sobering statistics and hopeful success stories.

We’re most concerned with the state of global health here at the Millennium Foundation and the 66th General Assembly has been flush with new data. In this post, we’ve tried to curate what we learned before, during and after this year’s “UN Week:”

Malaria Successes:

In early September, before the masses arrived in New York, the Roll Back Malaria Partnership (RBM) released what was probably the best news the whole month: According to their research, global malaria deaths have dropped by an estimated fifth over the last decade. This means that over a million lives have been saved thanks to more funding, in the form of malaria drugs and mosquito bed-nets.

According to the report, 43 countries have cut malaria deaths by 38%, with 11 of them in Africa. A decade ago, malaria-bearing mosquitoes reaped a grim toll in sub-Saharan Africa, with children and pregnant mothers the most at risk. Now for the first time, it is possible to imagine zero malaria deaths in the near future. “The results of the past decade exceed what anyone could have predicted and prove that malaria control is working,” said Robert Newman, director of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) global malaria program.

MDG Progress:

September is the anniversary of the 2000 United Nations Millennium Summit, when leaders of 189 countries agreed to the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Today, these goals provide concrete guidelines for the global fight against poverty. A question on everyone’s mind last week: How are we doing?

According to the UN’s Millennium Development Goal (MDG) Gap Task Force Report, last year was a record year for development aid, with $129 billion provided by donor countries. Yet experts agree that without new funding, these targets will not be met by the deadline in 2015. “There is a troubling distance between what we have promised and what we are actually doing to support the global partnership for development,” said UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon at the report’s launch.

But the report made room for successes as well. UNITAID, the drug-purchasing facility that financed MASSIVEGOOD, was mentioned for its success in bringing down HIV drugs prices, a key challenge in meeting MDG 6: Fight HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis. According to the report:

In cooperation with the Clinton HIV/AIDS Initiative (CHAI), UNITAID has provided predictable funding for large-scale purchases of pediatric ARVs. [Child-friendly HIV treatments] The results have been most impressive: the average number of suppliers per pediatric product has doubled, the coverage of treatment of children in need increased from 10 per cent in 2005 to 38 per cent in 2008 and the price of quality AIDS medicines for children has dropped by 60 per cent since 2006.

But other goals remain distant, especially the MDGs of ending childhood and maternal mortality (see below). At the beginning of the month, the WHO said that only seven African countries were on track to meet the fourth MDG on reducing child mortality by 2015, according to Devex. Only two countries are on track to achieve the fifth MDG on maternal mortality.

Moreover, despite UNITAID’s successes in lowering drug prices, overall funding for the fight against HIV/AIDS actually dropped by 10%, according to a study this August by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS. They found that donor governments disbursed US$ 6.9 billion in 2010 for HIV prevention, treatment, care and support—US$ 740 million less than in 2009.

As clinical trials this summer showed that HIV treatments can also be used to prevent transmission of the disease, public health experts now worry that funding shortfalls could endanger these incredible breakthroughs.

Health Workers

While many activists focused on obtaining more monetary commitments to improve global health, others focused on the human face of the public health profession – the frontline workers that provide the care. No matter how much money is raised in high-level meetings in Manhattan, it is the local community worker in India or the district nurse in Uganda that saves lives. As Jonathan Glennie argued on the Guardian’s “Poverty Matters Blog,” 3.5 million more public and NGO health workers are needed worldwide.

All throughout UN Week, international charity Save the Children led a campaign to raise awareness about the need for health workers. Last week the charity held an event in Times Square, gathering supporters, activists and celebs like Alexis Bledel to hold up parts of a “human mosaic,” seen in the photo above. The event helped get the message out that there are children in the world who are dying due to a lack of health workers. According to Save the Children, one single health worker can reach 5,000 children per year with life saving treatment.

Save the Children also found a direct correlation between health workers and child mortality in one of the more interesting studies released in the run-up to UN Week. The charity’s Health Worker Index rates the best and worse countries for a child to fall sick in. 161 countries are rated based on availability of trained health workers. Chad and Somalia are at the bottom of the index, while Switzerland and Finland are at the top.

According to Sarah Boseley’s Global Health Blog on the Guardian:

It stands to reason. Children die of malnutrition, of diarrhea, of malaria, of pneumonia and many other diseases in the poorest countries in the world. They need treatment, but often it is not just the drug or the food supplement that is lacking – it is the nurse or the community health worker who can diagnose what is wrong and do something about it. In some places, children never see a health worker in their sometimes pitifully short lives.

Women’s Health:

Last September saw a landmark in global health, with the creation of Every Woman Every Child, a strategy to save 16 million women and children by 2015. It wasn’t a coincide that UN

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon launched this in 2010, on the 10th anniversary of the MDG summit: As mentioned above, maternal health is one MDG that lacks significant commitment, with 350,000 women still dying each year from complications related to pregnancy and birth. As part of this strategy, $40 billion was pledged by governments, NGOs and companies.

This year, the World Health Organization issued its first review with a great bit of news – the strategy has attracted the support of numerous private sector partners. This includes a partnership with Johnson & Johnson to train health workers in Tanzania and Ethiopia – the first-ever corporate grant to a joint UN program. Read about this initiative and more here.

But behind these commitments lie the hard facts. The stats are difficult – after all, behind every number is a mother who died in what is supposed to be the most precious time in a parent’s life, the birth of a newborn. On September 19th, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington released promising but still unacceptable stats:

-          Under-5 child deaths declined from 11.6 million in 1990  to 7.2 million deaths in 2011

-          Maternal mortality has also continued to decline, from 409,100 deaths in 1990 to 273,500 deaths in 2011

First UNWTO conference on ethics and tourism – Can we do more?

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Spain holds a special place in our hearts at the Millennium Foundation, as it’s the first country in which we fully rolled out our micro-donation solution MASSIVEGOOD. From airline Iberia to online ticketing agency Rumbo, the travel industry there has united to give their customers the chance to donate for global health causes.

So for us, it was completely appropriate that the first-ever conference on ethics and tourism took place last week in Madrid, organized by the Spanish General Secretariat of Tourism and Domestic Trade and the UN World Tourism Organization (UNWTO). After all, the Spanish tourism sector has shown tremendous courage and desire to innovate, despite the economic crisis. [To see this enthusiasm in play, we curated twitter feeds during the conference, to show how #ethics and #tourism buzzed].

At the end of the conferece, two of our major partners in Spain, Amadeus and Iberia, joined Spain’s largest tourism companies to sign a “Global Code of Ethics for Tourism.” Spain’s Crown Prince Felipe was there for the signing, along with tourism industry professionals from all over the world. Another first for Spain, this Code of Ethics is a set of principles designed to guide the development of tourism in a way that maximizes the socio-economic benefits of the sector. “A tourism sector without an ethical conscience can harm our planet,” said Taleb Rifai, Secretary-General UNWTO.

We were there as well, to talk about how the travel industry – which generates almost one out of every ten dollars spent in the global economy – can get their customers involved in ethical tourism by generating more money for the fight against poverty.

“This is not the time to take our foot of the pedal,” our Managing Director Henk Mulder told the conference. “There has been some progress on the health-related Millennium Development Goals, but with a looming financial crisis and decreases in development budgets, we are not on track to meet these targets by 2015.”

So how can travel companies bridge this gap? Our partners had some good answers.

According to Felipe González-Abad, Senior Advisor of Amadeus IT Group, by applying business sense to charity, his company can develop products that can do good. “We don’t have a whole pile of money set aside for charity,” he said during a session on corporate social responsibility (CSR). “Instead we’ve tried to use everything in our chain of value as a technology company to develop projects and do what we are best at.”

We’d agree! Amadeus designed our donation technology, which can be integrated into any travel booking platform.

For Berta Valverde, Publicity and Corporate Sponsorship Director at Iberia, CSR  must be aligned with a company’s core business. “What transport people and goods by air so for corporate social responsibility, we try to offer these same services,” she said. “Whether it is bringing children from developing countries to get treated in Spain or making space in the cargo hold for humanitarian good, we do what we do best.”

Despite these commitments, action will need to be taken quickly in order to really make a difference with further economic turmoil looming. As with the financial crisis in 2008, both developed and developing countries stand to suffer from increased economic woes. Just this August, a report from UNAIDS showed that Western government support for HIV/AIDS in poor countries dropped 10% in 2010. As both Iberia and Amadeus have shown, the travel industry could use its strengths to make up for these shortfalls, especially with with nearly one billion tourists crossing international borders.

“We need to place ethics, responsibility and sustainability at the core of all our actions,” said Mr. Rifai.

Iberia's Berta Valverde speaks

 

Blogging for UNITAID in Cameroon

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The intricacies of global health financing are difficult to explain in a short blog post, tweet or web video. A complicated network of development agencies and charities provides desperately needed funds in developing countries, a global partnership that can be daunting to describe even though its impact has saved thousands of lives.

Yet a group of bloggers did a fantastic job last month in Cameroon, by telling the story of the critical work carried out by UNITAID in sub-Saharan Africa. They explained UNITAID’s unique model not through 200-page reports, but with light, informative and compelling posts.

Here at the Millennium Foundation we admit we have a soft spot in our heart for the 200 pagers… But we love the blogs as well. Especially when they are blogging about the innovative model that UNITAID uses to provide drugs and diagnostics to 94 countries around the world.

Along for the trip with Philippe Douste-Blazy, Chairman UNITAID: Baratunde Thurston, Director of Digital for the Onion; Blogger Cheryl Contee; Lawyer-by-day/blogger-by night Jill Filipovic; UN Dispatch blogger Mark Leon Goldberg and globe-trotting strategist Felix Marquardt.

In a roller-coaster of a blog post, Cheryl Contee (pictured above at right) leads us on a detailed account of their journey to meet Cameroonian patients, community workers and other good-doers involved in the fight against HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. There’s plenty of photos, both of “booty-shaking the African way” and play-by-play details of how UNITAID does an in country visit. According to Cheryl, it’s “Roll Deep…Go Hard…Get Out…” Read it for yourself. She’s summed up UNITAID perfectly:

UNITAID is a new (5 years old) and cutting-edge United Nations organization that is funded in part through micro-payments on airplane tickets. It’s the equivalent of one or 2 euros on economy class tix and a little more for business and first class tickets.

 

I encourage you to consider checking that box when you see it. UNITAID is doing some pretty amazing work. UNITAID is small — only 50 people and based out of Geneva. They have a lot of implementing partners — in other words, they concentrate on figuring out who are the best people on the ground to distribute drugs and manage treatments in communities. Folks they work with include UNICEF, the Clinton Foundation, the Gates Foundation, UNAIDS, The Global Fund and lots of other local groups. We met some of UNITAID’s local board members & partners while there and they were pretty amazing people.

Mark Leon Goldberg carried a clear intro about UNITAID in his first blog post from the visit:

UNITAID–if you are a reader of this blog, you’ve probably heard of it, but not quite sure what it does. Compared to groups like UNICEF or the World Health Organization, it is a relatively unknown organization, at least in the United States…

 

In 2007 UNITAID stepped in to back the development of cheap pediatric HIV/AIDS medicines with the promise of purchasing large quantities of these medicines for distribution in the developing world.  Today, 8 out of 10 children on HIV treatment in the world are using treatments backed by UNITAID. That’s just one example of the kind of unglamorous but life saving work that UNITAID accomplishes.

Since its creation in 2006, UNITAID has invested $17 million in Cameroon alone. These funds are being used to purchase key life-saving products: test and treatments for HIV in both children and adults; treatment to cure someone of TB; and importantly, health interventions to prevent a mother transmitting HIV to her newborn baby. The numbers are impressive, but it’s the stories that matter.

In another post, Mark Leon Goldberg tells the story of an HIV-positive woman he met, who was given treatment to give birth to an HIV-negative baby. But she stopped her treatment after giving birth, causing her to develop resistance. Now, the only way she can continue living a healthy life is with powerful yet prohibitively expensive “second line” drugs:

This is where UNITAID comes in. One of the reasons the costs of second and third line treatments are so high is that the drug manufactures hold expensive patents on the drugs. On the one hand, this is reasonable enough: drug manufacturers invest a great deal into R&D and deserve a decent return on their investment. On the other hand, if costs don’t come down, a several thousand people living with HIV who require second line treatment will not be able to access it.

 

UNITAID’s  brand new “patent pool” seeks to bridge the moral imperative to provide low cost drugs to patients and drug companies’ need to see a return on their investments. Drug companies who participate in the patent pool hand over their patents over to UNITAID, which makes those patents available to generic drug manufacturers.The pool was officially launched last month when Gilead Sciences turned four HIV drug patents over to UNITAID. They need other major drug manufacturers like GlaxoSmithKline and Johnson and Johnson to get on board if it is going to really work.

When you give to MASSIVEGOOD through our travel partners in the US, your donation goes to UNITAID. Cheryl ended her post with an inspiring call to action:

This is where UNITAID doesn’t believe in waiting or hoping. They do their biz and get to steppin’. They’re about action and if they can put themselves out of business through eradicating disease, I think they would do it. But for now, there’s plenty to do and no time to waste. People’s lives are on the line and through UNITAID, there’s something we can all do to help each other. Make sure to check that donation box to UNICEF when buying that plane ticket once it’s available. For every dollar they get from you, they can treat a couple of sick people. Small actions can make a difference.

Have a look at Felix Marquardt’s account here and Jill Filipovic’s post on her experience.

The UNITAID bloggers:

Felix Marquardt, Mark Leon Goldberg, Jill Filipovic, Baratunde Thurston and Cheryl Contee, Photo Credit: Felix Marquardt



Where your MASSIVEGOOD click goes

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50 seconds on how your click can help the Red Cross save lives in refugee camps in Tanzania when booking on Iberia.com.

We’ve gotten Iberia on board our network of Spanish partners – this means travelers to Europe from the US can now give to our ongoing campaign with the Red Cross!

We’ve spelled it out for you: Why you should give, where to click, where the money goes and exactly what your micro-donation can buy. Next time you travel in Spain, look for MASSIVEGOOD on our partner booking websites

 

 

Summer reading for social good

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Looking for some light summer reading? Perhaps the Millennium Development Goals Report 2011isn’t the best beach read, but we’ve summed up the major points that relate to our work to improve global health.

You might not have heard of the Millennium Development Goals, but they are the world’s best overall indicators about the fight against poverty.

More than simple measurements, the Goals are a rare example of global consensus. At the 2000 United Nations Millennium Summit, leaders of 189 countries promised to alleviate the suffering of the world’s poor. The eight “Millennium Development Goals”were born and the international community gave itself until 2015 to meet these targets, which include tackling poverty, illness and hunger in developing countries. These goals spawned a new generation of public and private activists, who use the goals as a rallying cry – the Millennium Foundation included.

The annual “Millennium Development Goals Report,” released by the UN Secretary General, shows overall progress in meeting this poverty elimination targets. We’ve laid out the major health-related progress cited in the report:

The number of child deaths under the age of five declined from 12.4 million in 1990 to 8.1 million in 2009, which means nearly 12,000 fewer children die each day.

The highest levels of under-five mortality continue to be found in sub-Saharan Africa, where one in eight children die before the age of five.            

Increased funding and intensive control efforts have cut deaths from malaria by 20 per cent worldwide – from nearly 985,000 in 2000 to 781,000 in 2009.                     

Regardless, 90% of all deaths from malaria still occur in sub-Saharan Africa

New HIV infections have been on a steady decline.In 2009, some 2.6 million people were newly infected with HIV – a 21 per cent drop since 1997, when new infections peaked.          

Still, 33.3 million people are living with HIV globally

The number of people receiving antiretroviral therapy for HIV or AIDS increased 13-fold from 2004 to 2009, thanks to increased funding and expanded programes.                       

New and powerful treatments exist so that people can live full and long lives with HIV – as a result, the number of people that need therapy as grown – from 10 million to 14.6 million at the end of 2009

“Patent pool” for HIV drugs makes waves

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Global health activists declared a victory this week as the first pharmaceutical company made the jump into the world’s only “patent pool” for HIV medicines, the Medicines Patent Pool.

Gilead Sciences, a leading producer of HIV drugs, announced on July 12th that it will allow generic manufactures to make affordable versions of its powerful life-saving HIV treatments. As part of this “Patent Pool agreement,” Gilead will license its technology to low-cost producers in exchange for a small royalty payment. For global health observers, this is a massive step forward for pharma. (If you are lost at this stage scroll down below for a great explanatory video on patent pools).

The Guardian’s Sarah Boesly argues on her global health blog that this agreement will allow generic companies in India (which already supply the bulk of HIV treatments to Africa) to make cheap copies and combine important licensed drugs. She writes:

People with HIV in poor countries [now] have a real prospect of obtaining not just the basic, cheap drugs to keep the virus at bay, but some of the best medicines that are on offer anywhere in the world – at a price their governments can afford.

The Medicines Patent Pool was founded in 2010 to improve access for the word’s poor to HIV medicines by negotiating such voluntary licenses. According to Ellen ‘t Hoen, executive director of the Medicines Patent Pool, six other patent holders are currently negotiating with the organization, including ViiV Healthcare, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Roche, Boehringer Ingelheim and Sequoia Pharmaceuticals. “This is not just a one-off. The whole field is changing … there will be more to follow,” she told Reuters.

The more companies that jump into the pool, the more prices can be driven down by competition between generic makers. Stay tuned for developments – this pool could start making huge waves very soon.

For those interested in the nitty-gritty legal details of this ground-breaking deal, the Medicines Patent Pool has posted the full licensing agreement on their website here. The Medicines Patent Pool was founded by UNITAID, which also created the Millennium Foundation to raise more funds for global health through the travel industry.

And for those that want to learn more about how the patent pool works, we suggest the video below, created back in 2009 when civil society organizations were pushing for the creation of a patent pool. Seems their dreams are coming true:

The Millennium Foundation wins ATME Inspiration Award

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The Association of Travel Marketing Executives awarded the Millennium Foundation with an “Inspiration Award” for “breakthrough thinking and innovative marketing” at its annual conference in Boston on June 13-14th.

The ATME recognizes executives and companies for innovative tactics and broad marketing vision. Called the ATLAS awards, they are the only results driven marketing awards in the travel industry.

Alongside MASSIVEGOOD, Delta Air Lines, Alaska Airlines, REI Adventure, and former ATME chairman, Joel Chusid were also recognized with an award at the 25th Awards banquet. They were selected by a committee of travel marketing executives, honor innovators in the industry who have produced groundbreaking results through the use of creative marketing strategies.

How did we do it? Through our flagship project MASSIVEGOOD, which enables travels to give micro-donations towards global health when they booka flight, hotel or car rental.

Thank you ATME! And here’s our response:

AIDS at 30 – Where we stand

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This month marks the 30th anniversary of the discovery of AIDS. It has been a time to remember the some 30 million who have perished from AIDS since the first reports of a rare form of pneumonia surfaced in 1981.

This somber anniversary has also seen a welcome return to the front pages and to the public’s attention of this killer disease. From the front page of the Economist, to CNN, to local papers through the USA, the media has shed some needed light on a disease that continues to take millions of lives every year.

After all, AIDS is one global issue that concerns both the world’s richest countries and its poorest populations. 34 million people live with HIV today. Over the decades, AIDS has slipped in and out of the media’s attention, with the bad and good news sometimes under-reported. This month will be vital in educating the public about the amazing progress that has been made – and how everyday people can help.

Why this month? In June 1981, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued its first warning about an unusual lung infection discovered in California. A year later the disease was established as Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). At the end of the decade, the number of reported AIDS cases reached 100,000 – in 1994 it was the leading cause of death for all Americans ages 25 to 44. It was also at in the mid-1990s that Americans began to hear of the horrible effects the disease was having in the developing world, in countries like South Africa where 16% of the adult population was HIV-positive or Botswana, where 26% of adults were living with HIV.

The first major breakthrough came in 1994 with the introduction of life-saving antiretroviral treatment. By adhering to a strict regimen of these powerful drugs, patients could beat the death sentence implicit when tested positive for HIV.  Doctors soon learned that these drugs could be administered to HIV-positive mothers to greatly reduce the chance of transmission to their newborns. For many Americans, the implicit death sentence behind HIV was lifted. But these drugs were prohibitively expensive for almost everyone in low-income countries.

Today, global efforts have made a difference by channeling billions of dollars to the purchase of these treatments for countries in Africa and Asia gripped by the AIDS crisis. Today about 6.6 million people receive antiretroviral therapy in low- and middle-income countries, according to UNAIDS. This is a nearly 22-fold increase since 2001. David Brown from the Washington Post examines these financing successes in great depth, in his recent piece:

The most important step in bringing AIDS treatment to people in the developing world has been the huge decline in the cost of antiretroviral drugs over the last 15 years. Three-drug ART combinations cost $10,000 to $12,000 a year in 1996 when they became standard AIDS therapy in the United States. The Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), one of former president Bill Clinton’s charities, recently announced a new schedule of brokered prices in which a three-drug combination, which includes the highly favored drug tenofovir, runs $159 a year. The price of an older, less desirable triple combination is $79 a year — less than 1 percent of what it used to be.

These price reductions were achieved with the help of UNITAID, the organization for which we raise funds. UNITAID worked with CHAI to achieve price reductions of almost $600 million, according to an announcement made by UNITAID this May. They did it by what is called “demand-side” price reductions. This means stimulating market competition and achieving cost reductions through more efficient manufacturing processes and sourcing of raw materials.  By focusing its resources within emerging markets, UNITAID generated sufficient demand to trigger major price reductions. This also accelerated the introduction of important new products, such as child-friendly antiretrovirals.

There is more good news. Groundbreaking new data was released this May that showed early usage of these treatments can cut HIV transmission to a sexual partner by 96 percent. For researchers, it showed that HIV treatment can stop the virus’s transmission in addition to stopping it from reproducing in their bodies. As Nobel Prize winner Francoise Barre-Sinoussi,  who helped discover HIV in the 1980s, wrote in the International Herald Tribnte last week, this demonstrates the “treatment as prevention concept.”

In its lead article last week, the Economist spelled out the funding problem involved:

At the moment, only those showing symptoms of AIDS, or whose level of a crucial immune-system cell has fallen below a certain threshold, are offered treatment. Even so, there are reckoned to be about 9m people who need treatment but are not receiving it. Add those who have no symptoms and that becomes about 27m. At $100 for a year’s course of the drugs, plus around $400 for the cost of administration, they would need a lot of money. In 2010, according to UNAIDS, the world spent $16 billion on the epidemic. Treating all 34m people infected might mean almost doubling that.

And that is the fundamental issue that confronts us. More money will be needed to meet the increased demand for treatments. In AIDS at 30: Nations at the crossroads, UNAIDS reports that investments in the HIV response in low- and middle-income countries rose nearly 10-fold between 2001 and 2009. However, in 2010, international resources for HIV declined, according to the report, and developing countries remain dependent on the bulk of their funding for HIV.

“I am worried that international investments are falling at a time when the AIDS response is delivering results for people,” said Michel Sidibé, UNAIDS Executive Director. “If we do not invest now, we will have to pay several times more in the future.”

 

Photo (via Flickr):  calvinfleming