The chairman of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria has warned that climate change and violence are hampering efforts to combat three of the most deadly infectious illnesses in the world.
The COVID-19 pandemic had a significant impact on international disease-fighting efforts, but those efforts have fully recovered, according to the Fund’s 2023 outcomes report, which was made public on Monday.
But if “extraordinary steps” are not taken, the world is likely to miss the goal of eradicating AIDS, TB, and malaria by 2030, according to Peter Sands, executive director of the Global Fund. This is because of the growing obstacles posed by climate change and violence.
For instance, malaria is now present in highland regions of Africa that were once too cold for the mosquitoes that transmit the disease-causing parasite to survive.
According to the report, extreme weather conditions like floods are taxing medical resources, uprooting populations, spiking infection rates, and halting treatment across the board. It continued that accessing vulnerable people has proven to be extremely difficult in nations like Sudan, Ukraine, Afghanistan, and Myanmar owing to insecurity.
Positives do exist, according to Sands. For instance, 6.7 million people, or 1.4 million more than the year before, received TB treatment in the nations where the Global Fund has investments in 2022. Additionally, the Fund helped deliver 220 million mosquito nets and antiretroviral medication for HIV to 24.5 million patients.
Innovative tools for diagnosis and prevention also offered optimism, according to Sands.
In this week’s high-level discussion on TB at the UN General Assembly, activists anticipate greater attention to the illness.
Given that TB is the most lethal of the three diseases the Global Fund concentrates on, several TB experts have criticized the organization for not allocating more of its resources to the condition.
There is no question that the world has to invest more money in the fight against tuberculosis, but Sands explained that it is not as easy as comparing the number of deaths from each disease each year. He cited the fact that many of the nations with the highest rates of tuberculosis are middle-income nations, which are better able to pay for domestic health services.
