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Fred Ezeh, Abuja
The Global Fund to fight HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis (TB) and Malaria has called for urgent investment to protect decades of progress against HIV, TB and malaria in Africa and beyond, which are being derailed as a knock-on effect of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Fund, in a new report, said it has saved 38 million lives since 2002, including six million in 2019 alone which represents a 20 percent increase in the number of lives saved when compared to the previous year.
The Fund described it as a remarkable progress that resulted from increased efficiencies in service delivery, success in finding and treating people with lifesaving medicine, cost savings on health products, and improved collaboration across the Global Fund partnership.
Highlights of the report which was posted on the website of the Fund indicated that overall deaths caused by AIDS, TB and malaria each year reduced by nearly 50 percent since the peak of the epidemics in countries where the Global Fund invests.
Executive Director of the Global Fund, Peter Sands, said the Report demonstrates how a united world, led by strong commitments by communities, can work together to drive diseases into retreat.
Sands said: “We have made extraordinary progress, but COVID-19 now threatens to reverse the gains we have all worked so hard to achieve over the past years. We must not let that happen. We must unite to fight.
“We can’t surrender the gains we have made against HIV, TB and malaria, and allow our progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be sharply reversed. Let’s act with speed and scale, investing far greater resources than we have done in the past to counter both the direct impact of COVID-19 and to mitigate the knock-on consequences for HIV, TB and malaria.”
Meanwhile, the report disclosed that in 2019, no fewer than 20.1 million people received anti-retroviral therapy for HIV; 718,000 HIV-positive mothers received medicine to keep them alive and prevent transmitting HIV to their babies; 5.7 million people were tested and treated for TB; 160 million mosquito nets were distributed to protect nearly 320 million people from malaria for three years.
On HIV/AIDS, the Global Fund said that strong progress was made on several fronts in 2019, noting that while girls are still disproportionately affected by HIV compared to their male peers, infection rates among adolescent girls and young women have dropped by 51 percent since 2010 in 13 priority countries in sub-Saharan Africa where the Global Fund invests.
On TB, it said that a strategic initiative by the Global Fund, the Stop TB Partnership and WHO that focuses on 13 countries with the highest TB burden has accelerated progress in finding “missing” people with TB, undiagnosed, people, untreated and unreported, and could die or continue to spread the disease to others without treatment.
It said that the gap between TB notifications and TB incidence in the 13 focus countries fell from 49 percent in 2014 to 33 percent in 2018.
On Malaria, the Fund said that it has worked with partners to reduce the cost of an insecticide-treated mosquito net to less than US$2, and the cost of antimalarial treatment dropped to US$0.58 in 2019, a savings that helped purchase more than 14 million extra nets and treat more than 24 million additional people for malaria.
It, however, expressed concerns that many countries have been forced to delay mosquito net distribution campaigns, leaving people vulnerable to malaria, most of whom are children.
