Luke LONDON, Sep 18 – Climate change and conflict are undermining efforts to improve people’s health when in fact they are a real problem, says Peter Sands, the head of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria .
He was speaking in London ahead of the launch of the Global Fund’s 2024 report on Thursday, which builds on last year’s work and shows progress in tackling the three diseases after Covid-19 disrupted efforts.
Despite the progress, Sands said another legacy of the pandemic is that donor governments have grown tired of funding health, raising concerns about next year’s funding round being sufficient to cover the fund’s work in 2026-2028.
“Global health is actually affected to some degree by climate change and conflict,” he said, adding that these issues are intertwined with health.
“The same people … the poorest people are being affected by this triple whammy,” he said.
Climate change is killing people through rising malnutrition and disease, while collapsing health systems due to conflict may kill more people than bullets and bombs.
The Global Fund is the largest international funder of the fight against tuberculosis and malaria and the second-largest funder of HIV, investing more than $5 billion annually across the three diseases.
Thursday’s annual report showed that in 2023, about 25 million people in countries where the Global Fund works were on antiretroviral treatment, 7.1 million people received tuberculosis treatment and 227 million mosquito nets were distributed, the same as in 2022. Better than both.
Since the Fund’s inception in 2002, mortality rates from these three diseases have declined by 61%, saving an estimated 65 million lives, the report said.
The Fund is also working with health partners to reduce the price of medical supplies and the cost of HIV and tuberculosis treatment, as well as the cost of bed nets to prevent the spread of malaria, by 2023 to achieve reduction targets.
Cuts are also needed for exciting new HIV tools , such as Gilead Sciences’ long-acting injectable drug lenacapavir, Saunders said.
“They need to be priced so we can offer them on a larger scale,” Sands said.
