- Title: AUSTRIA: Bill Clinton and Bill Gates want value for money in AIDS fight
- Date: 20th July 2010
- Summary: VIENNA, AUSTRIA (JULY 19, 2010) (REUTERS) VIENNA FAIR BUILDING, VENUE OF AIDS CONFERENCE SIGN VIENNA FAIR ON BUILDING FLAGS WITH AIDS CONFERENCE LOGO READING "AIDS 2010" WAVING IN FRONT OF BUILDING DELEGATES ENTERING AND EXITING CONFERENCE BUILDING DELEGATE'S BADGE BEING CHECKED AT ENTRANCE LARGE GROUP OF DELEGATES WALKING TOWARDS CONFERENCE ROOM FORMER U.S. PRESID
- Embargoed: 4th August 2010 13:00
- Keywords:
- Location: Austria
- Country: Austria
- Topics: International Relations,Health
- Reuters ID: LVADR5I1EOIHEBSNH4KZ2CSOJSU2
- Story Text: Bill Clinton and Bill Gates urged AIDS activists on Monday to squeeze value out of every cent of funds to fight HIV, saying they could not expect donors to give more in hard times unless it was carefully spent.
"In too many countries, too much money goes to pay for too many people to go to too many meetings and get on too many aeroplanes to provide too much technical assistance. Too much is spent on studies and reports that sit on shelves. And maybe when we've got all the money in the world this is regrettable but not tragic, but keep in mind: every dollar we waste today puts a life at risk," former U.S. President Bill Clinton whose William Clinton Foundation works in the fight against AIDS, said addressing 20,000 AIDS scientists, health workers and activists at an international conference on AIDS in Vienna.
"It is time for the United States to lead the way and for other governments to do similar soul searching and hard headed analysis to see how we can take a higher percentage of every country's foreign aid budget and actually spend it in the countries that the money was appropriated for, on the people the money was designed to help, instead of on arthritis in the country in question", Clinton said.
Gates, a philanthropist whose Gates Foundation spends a large portion of its 34 billion U.S. dollar fund on fighting AIDS, said efficiency was vital to be able to scale up access to AIDS drugs for the 15 million people who need them.
"Even if we act now to prevent future infections the only way to save more lives immediately is to expand the number of people receiving treatment. Unfortunately the current high costs are making that very difficult. If you have AIDS and you go to a clinic you should never have to hear someone say 'I am sorry, you cannot have the drugs that would save your life, we don't have the money'. When funding is limited there are too ways to stop turning people away and continue expanding treatment: one is to reduce the cost of the drugs, the other is to reduce the other cost - of delivering them," Gates told the conference.
The head of the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria says it needs 20 billion U.S. dollars in the next three years to sustain progress in tackling the diseases.
Out of the 33.4 million people who are infected with the human immunodeficiency virus HIV that causes AIDS, 5.2 million now get the drugs they need. But non-drug-related costs of treatment, such as hospital costs, labs, testing and monitoring, are more than twice the cost of the medicines.
Gates also called for rapid scale-up of "cheap, effective, and easy to apply" HIV/AIDS prevention measures -- such as male circumcision and prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV -- which he said were so cost-effective "that in endemic countries it is more expensive not to pursue them".
Both Gates and Clinton also cited new studies showing that treating HIV patients with cocktails of AIDS drugs can dramatically reduce transmission of the virus to others.
Hundreds of protesters marched through the Vienna conference on its opening day on Sunday to demonstrate against a pullback of funding for AIDS in the wake of a global recession. - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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