The Secretary General, who addressed the board on the first day of its three-day deliberations at the Mailman School of Public Health of Columbia University, said its very existence was a signal that the world is willing "to make a decisive move to reduce the burden of these major communicable diseases."

People needed to see that all of those with a stake in the fund were capable of acting together swifly and efficiently, Annan said.

Not surprisingly, board members patted themselves on the back for the outcome of their consultations. "Less than three months after the global fund issued its first call for proposals, it is directing funds where they are needed to help fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria," said Chrispus Kiyonga, a Uganda cabinet minister who is serving as chairman. "The global fund's grants will provide critical support to effective prevention and treatment programs around the world."

Board member Philippa Lawson of the Academy for Educational Development said that although $2 billion had been pledged in less than a year since the project was launched, far more resources were necessary to fight the target diseases, which already affected millions of sufferers.

In another development, the appointment was announced of Professor Richard Feachem as executive director of the fund. A Briton, he is currently director of the Institute for Global Health at the Univesity of California, San Francisco and Berkeley. He was formerly dean of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and has worked on health, nutrition and population questions for the World Bank.

Although HIV/AIDS remains the headline grabber, some 800,000 children are estimated to die of malaria each year, and the World Health Organization just recommended a new treatment to replace conventional medicines when those were found not to be effective any more against the mosquito-born infection.

The proposed life saver derives in part from a Chinese herb and has the ability to kill the malaria parasite very fast, permitting a patient's speedy recovery, and with very few bad side effects, the UN agency said.

Its recommendation was motivated by evidence of an increase in child deaths from malaria because of medicines that failed or were of poor quality. Almost half of the cash spent on anti-malaria medicine went for inappropriate treatments, WHO said.

The new weapon is known as ACTs, for Artemisinin-based Combination Therapies. WHO director-general Gro Harlem Brundtland said her agency had managed to get price reductions for use of the treatment in developing countries.