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UN's Annan Proposes New Global Fund to Fight AIDS
Declaring the battle against AIDS his "personal priority," U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan will propose on Thursday a single global fund against the pandemic that kills 2.8 million people each year.
Unveiling a strategy to combat AIDS and other infectious diseases, he will call for financing from rich countries and private contributors but said that poor nations had to give priority in their budgets to a comprehensive health system.
The estimated cost for comprehensive health care would be $7 billion to $10 billion annually compared to the $1 billion currently spent in developing countries, he said, according to the text of a speech he was to deliver on Thursday.
Annan is keynote speaker at an African AIDS summit in the Nigerian capital on Thursday where leaders will sign a pledge calling on their countries to boost spending on health care as well as importing and producing their own generic AIDS drugs.
Africa is hardest hit by the disease, home of more than 70 percent of the world's 36 million people infected by HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. A generation of potentially productive young adults may be decimated, making AIDS Africa's biggest development challenge, Annan said.
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