Johannesburg - A leading international medical charity on Thursday warned that Western governments were showing signs of backtracking on their commitment to increase access to life-saving treatment for AIDS patients. Dr Tido von Schoen-Angerer, a director at Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors without Borders, MSF) said his group was seeing "very clear signs" that commitment to the fight against HIV/AIDS was "waning" in the West.
Two major funders of AIDS treatment in poor countries - the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and the US President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) - were planning to either scale back or freeze their funding levels, MSF maintained.
Four million HIV-positive people are currently on anti-retroviral therapy (ARVs) worldwide.
More than 6 million more people are in need of the treatment, according to the MSF report "Punishing Success? Early signs of a Retreat from Commitment to HIV/AIDS Care and Treatment."
Freezing or cutting for HIV/AIDS treatment would be "condemning them (those waiting to access treatment) to die," MSF said.
The MSF said the Global Fund is considering taking a "gap year" from funding in 2010 and that PEPFAR plans to freeze funding at the same level for two years - despite previously promising to increase its funding for treatment, according to MSF.
Global Fund communications director Jon Liden told the German Press Agency dpa, that while the fund might have to delay the approval of new funding requests by a few months "this is not that serious".
The fund, which governments endowed with 10 billion dollars between 2008 and 2010, was changing the way it awards funding to make the process simpler, Liden said. That reorganization could cause a delay but it would not affect countries' current funding stream.
Several African countries rely on Western donors to pay for the drugs that keep millions of their HIV-positive citizens alive.
The impoverished mountain kingdom of Lesotho, which has the third- highest HIV prevalence rate in the world, relies entirely on donors to fund treatment for 50,000 people.
Freezing or cutting funding for treatment - after world leaders in 2005 promised to support universal AIDS treatment coverage by 2010 - "would be an international betrayal," Dr Eric Goemaere, MSF medical coordinator in South Africa, said.
It would mean that new patients could not be enrolled on treatment until someone else died, he said.
MSF said some donor governments were trying to divert resources from HIV/AIDS to other diseases that are cheaper to treat in the current recessionary environment.
The US government's spending on AIDS jumped under former president George W Bush.
In May, Obama said he would ask Congress for 63 billion dollars in funding over the next six years to expand basic health care access in developing countries but MSF said "the jury was still out" on his administration's commitment to scaling up AIDS treatment and that the White House appeared to be focused on the bottom line.
"Cutting HIV/AIDS funding is not the answer," Schoen-Angerer, warned, adding: "The HIV/AIDS emergency is definitely not over."
