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 "The United States should be at the forefront of new discoveries
into how to put HIV into long-term remission without requiring
lifelong therapies, or better yet, eliminate it completely," Obama
said.
Obama made the announcement Monday at a White House event marking
World AIDS Day, which was Sunday — and as health leaders and
philanthropists gathered in Washington to determine how to replenish
the major global health fund that combats AIDS and two of the
world's other leading killers in low-income countries.
Obama pledged that the U.S. would contribute up to $5 billion over
the next three years to The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis
and Malaria — as long as other countries do their part and
contribute $10 billion. The U.S. matches contributions to the
Geneva-based Global Fund on a 1-to-2 funding ratio set by Congress.
"Don't leave our money on the table," Obama said Monday.
The Global Fund is trying to raise $15 billion to cover its programs
from 2014 to 2016. The fund supports HIV therapy for more than 5
million people, as well as treatments for tuberculosis and malaria,
and the distribution of insecticide-treated bed nets. Also Monday,
billionaire Bill Gates said he planned to nearly double his
foundation's contribution to this next round of the Global Fund, to
$500 million. Gates had already pledged $300 million, but told a
small group of reporters at the National Institutes of Health that
he would match an additional $200 million from private sources in an
effort to draw in new donors.
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Gates donned a biohazard suit and respirator for a close-up look at
how NIH scientists are hunting new therapies for increasingly
drug-resistant tuberculosis. He emerged from the laboratory
energized about promising candidates — but with a sober message for
policymakers: Defeating global killers like TB and AIDS requires
adequate funding of both the delivery of today's treatments and the
research required for better ones.
"We're deeply disappointed" in cuts to the NIH's budget, Gates
said.
Earlier this year, NIH lost $1.5 billion of its $31 billion budget
to automatic spending cuts known as the sequester, after years of
budgets that didn't keep up with inflation. NIH is scheduled to lose
another $600 million from a second round of sequester cuts set to
take effect next month. That in turn limits how much the NIH can
devote to different diseases.
"Investing in research has huge paybacks," Gates said.
[Associated
Press; LAURAN NEERGAARD, AP Medical Writer]
Copyright 2013 The Associated
Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
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