GENEVA (AFP) — Global funding for HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment must be quadrupled to 42 billion dollars (30 billion euros) over the next three years to stop the pandemic worsening, the UN said Wednesday.
The agency coordinating the fight against the disease, UNAIDS, said in a report that the 10 billion dollars expected this year was far short of meeting the target of "universal access" to care in 2010, despite an "unprecedented" global mobilisation of resources.
Eleven years ago, only 300 million dollars was available to tackle HIV/AIDS.
"A failure to move beyond the limited successes achieved to date will only cause the epidemic to worsen," UNAIDS said, underlining the need for 42.2 billion dollars in 2010.
The report was released for a major international meeting in Berlin starting on Wednesday which is aiming to collect funding pledges for HIV/AIDS programmes around the world between 2008 and 2010.
The funding gap between what is required to tackle HIV/AIDS every year and the amount of money provided grew from six billion dollars last year to 8.1 billion dollars in 2007, the report said.
In 2005 the gap stood at 2.8 billion dollars.
UNAIDS warned that if the current pace continues, finance from public and private sources will reach about 15.4 billion in 2010 but fall even further behind the growth of the disease.
About 4.6 million people would receive life-saving anti retroviral drugs in 2010 under that scenario, equivalent to just two-thirds of the number who needed such treatment four years ago, the agency said.
Yet the disease will be claiming even more victims in three years' time. About 39.5 million people were living with HIV or AIDS at the end of last year.
"The high levels of funding that will be needed to move towards universal access in the coming years reflect the world's failure to respond to the epidemic before it achieved crisis proportions," the report added.
"The same principle holds today - we cannot afford the costs of inaction," it warned. About 54 billion dollars a year would be needed by 2015.
A slower but consistent path to reach nearly 50 billion dollars of funding by 2015 -- and the UN's goal of starting to reverse the epidemic -- would demand an additional five to six billion dollars a year in spending every year until then.
However, with an immediate full scale-up in prevention, more than half of new HIV infections expected between 2005 and 2015 could be averted, according to the report.
"Unless we can prevent new infections, future treatment costs will continue to mount," it added.
UNAIDS underlined that if "prudent investments" had been made 10 to 20 years ago to strengthen health systems, prevention, and tackle the "drivers" behind the epidemic, much smaller amounts of money would be needed today.
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