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Spending on the global fight against AIDS fell significantly in 2010 for the first time since the U.S. and other governments began making major donations, according to a new report.
The decline comes at a point of growing demand for money to implement new prevention methods that could control the spread of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. More than 25 million people have died of AIDS since the 1980s, and more than 34 million people globally are infected today with HIV.
The global economic crisis has slowed governments’ contributions to the fight against AIDS over the past two years, but last year’s 9.7% drop in funding was due largely to tougher criteria established by Congress for disbursement of U.S. funds, according to the report, released Monday by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS.
The U.S. is the world’s largest AIDS donor by far, accounting for more than half the funds contributed last year. But Washington disbursed just over $3.7 billion in 2010, about $700 million less than in 2009. Six other governments, of 15 surveyed, also doled out less, as measured in their own currencies. Currency fluctuations also played a small role in the declines.
All told, governments donated about $6.9 billion in 2010, down 9.7% from about $7.6 billion in the prior year, the report said.
“The impact may be real. That’s money that didn’t go into the field,” said Jennifer Kates, Kaiser’s director of Global Health Policy and HIV.
It is unclear whether last year’s drop signals a trend of big cuts. But it comes as scientists face a painful reality: AIDS budgets are flagging just as new methods to prevent HIV infection have been identified, handing public-health leaders their first real chance to curb the decades-old epidemic—if they can secure the funds needed to implement the measures.
Last year’s slowdown in U.S. funding “should really be a one-time occurrence” tied to the introduction of new agreements, said Jennifer Peterson, a spokeswoman for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the government’s main vehicle for funding AIDS programs overseas.
But at the very least, “the era of exponential increases is over,” said Ms. Kates, noting that the difference in global AIDS funding between 2008 and 2009 was negligible. U.S. funding for global AIDS for fiscal 2011 is about $28 million less than for fiscal 2010, she said.
Under new requirements established by Congress in 2008, the U.S. must set five-year objectives with each recipient country before disbursing funds, a process that slowed the release of $500 million last year as agreements with 15 of 32 eligible countries were hammered out, Ms. Peterson said.
U.S. officials also held up $71 million of a $1.05 billion contribution to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria because they must now review the fund’s operating expenses, staff salaries, and other criteria before disbursing funds, Ms. Peterson said. Recipients of the remaining funds for fiscal 2010 have yet to be identified, she said.