Global Policy Forum

By Karen DeYoung

U.N. officials struggling to increase international efforts to combat the AIDS pandemic breathed a sigh of relief yesterday when the world's fourth-largest financial institution, the Credit Suisse Group, became the first private corporation to contribute money to a new global fund proposed by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan.

Credit Suisse said it would give $1 million to the fund through its Winterthur insurance subsidiary. In a statement, Winterthur said it would also be involved in AIDS prevention and information campaigns.

Annan wants to increase international funding to combat AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis, currently at an annual $1.8 billion, to between $7 billion and $10 billion a year. To reach that total, he has called on developed-world governments, private foundations and corporations to step up their bilateral programs and to contribute at least $1 billion to the new fund.

So far, the United States has pledged $200 million and France has promised $127 million over the next three years. But none of the major foundations has offered to contribute to the fund, and, until yesterday, there had been no corporate contributions.

Gro Harlem Brundtland, director general of the World Health Organization, said the Credit Suisse contribution proved "the private sector is now beginning to mobilize its support" for an initiative that "makes good economic sense."

Annan hopes to have the fund up and running by the end of this year, with the bulk of new funds going to combat AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa, home to 70 percent of an estimated 36 million people worldwide who are infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which causes the disease.

Although institutions with a stake in solving the AIDS crisis agree that substantially more money is needed, they are far from agreeing on how to spend it. It is still a largely theoretical question until the funds are available, but the decibel level of the debate has risen noticeably with the approach of a U.N. General Assembly special session on HIV/AIDS scheduled to begin June 25.

The crux of the debate is whether the world should focus virtually all of its resources on preventing the spread of the disease in Africa -- as the Bush administration and others have argued -- or should, as AIDS activists and humanitarian groups say, also devote a significant part of any new money to expensive treatment for those who already have the disease.

Three U.S.-based AIDS activist organizations, led by the Health GAP Coalition, sharply criticized the Bush administration's top foreign aid official yesterday for what they described as "ignorant and racist" remarks on the subject. Andrew S. Natsios, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, told the Boston Globe this week that Africans were incapable of following complicated, multi-drug AIDS treatment, which requires taking different pills at specified times of day, because many of them "don't know what Western time is."

"Many people in Africa have never seen a clock or a watch their entire lives," Natsios, who spent a number of years involved in aid work in Africa, was quoted as saying. ". . . They know morning, they know evening, they know the darkness at night."

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