By Matt Hirschler
LONDON (AlertNet) Â? Cutting funds now for fighting AIDS will only lead to higher costs later, in money as well as lives, a leading charity has warned, saying it has the evidence to back up its claim.
Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said new data from a project it runs in the southern African country of Lesotho proves that earlier treatment cuts death rates and hospitalisation of HIV patients by more than 60 percent.
It said donors are reducing their funding now, ignoring scientific evidence that early intervention saves lives and avoids higher costs later when patients are treated for related illnesses.
Details of MSF's findings were presented at an international AIDS conference in Vienna on Thursday in an effort to dissuade donors from calling for HIV treatment to start later in order to save money.
"Today international donors expect doctors to tell patients to come back for treatment when they're at death's door," doctor Eric Goemaere, medical coordinator at MSF in South Africa, said in a statement.
"This is bad medicine. As a doctor I'd much rather give a patient pills today and send her home, than delay treatment and see her in six months at the hospital with complicated tuberculosis."
DONATIONS FALL FOR FIRST TIME
The U.S.-based Kaiser Foundation said this week that donations to the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria fell in 2009 for the first time since it was founded in 2002, and an MSF report said this trend looks set to continue as the global financial crisis lingers.
Since 2002 there had been large increases in donations each year to the Fund, the world's principal funding mechanism for HIV treatment.
As a result, 5.2 million people now receive treatment for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which can lead to AIDS. But MSF pointed out around 10 million more are still waiting for treatment Â? and said this is no time for cuts. In all 33.4 million people have HIV.
"At the moment we need to start treating new people we are restricting access, that's the irony," MSF spokesman Jean-Marc Jacobs told AlertNet.
Most of those who still need treatment are in southern Africa, where uptake of the costly but effective antiretroviral treatment has been well below U.N. targets in recent years.
MSF said it is seeing patients being turned away from clinics throughout the region.
The medical charity said the United States is advising aid recipients to treat only patients with more developed HIV.
WAITING LISTS AT CLINICS
UK-based Avert, another charity working in HIV prevention, echoed MSF's warning on underfunding.
Avert director Annabel Kanabus told AlertNet she is "very fearful" of the current trend for falling donations.
She said the group is starting to see waiting lists emerge at clinics following last year's flattening of international donations, and warned that rising fuel costs have also left clinics having to do "more with less".
Former U.S. President Bill Clinton and Microsoft Chairman 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 money is carefully spent.
Gates, whose $34 billion foundation contributes significantly to HIV/AIDS programmes, told the Vienna conference value for money would mean prevention and treatment could continue, even with less funding.
The Global Fund says it needs $20 billion in the next three years to sustain progress in tackling the diseases.
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