Bloomberg article - 18 January, 2012

Financial Crisis May Kill in Congo as Global Health Aid Stalls

By Simeon Bennett

 

Jan. 17 (Bloomberg) -- Europe’s debt crisis has brought down governments, roiled markets and triggered austerity measures affecting millions. Now it may kill.

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 28,000 people with HIV who were meant to start life-saving treatment by 2014 may not because of shortfalls in the foreign aid that pays for the nation’s AIDS drugs, according to Doctors Without Borders. Some of those people will get sick and die, said Thierry Dethier, an HIV analyst with the charity that runs AIDS clinics in Congo.

“Because of the lack of drugs people don’t test themselves,” Dethier said in an interview from the capital, Kinshasa. “And because of that, people with AIDS are dying.”

Governments struggling to curb deficits from Spain to the U.S. have cut or slowed the growth of their contributions to the World Health Organization and disease-fighting funds that prop up health services in the world’s poorest countries, according to a report by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, a research unit at the University of Washington in Seattle.

“The financing is only going to get worse,” said Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University in Washington, and a member of a committee advising the WHO on an overhaul of the Geneva-based organization. “You’ve got donor states in financial crisis and there is increased competition for funds.”

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