Posted on January 30, 2006

Gates Foundation to Triple Funding for TB Eradication

The Seattle-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has announced that it will triple, to $900 million, the amount it is prepared to commit to eradicate tuberculosis by 2015, the Associated Press reports.

Foundation co-founder Bill Gates made the announcement at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, as Britain's chancellor of the exchequer Gordon Brown and Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo called for help to treat the fifty million people infected with the disease. The move is part of a ten-year initiative to cut TB cases and deaths by half — an effort that could save more than fourteen million lives over the next decade, according to the Geneva-based Stop TB Partnership, an international network of public and private groups working to eliminate TB as a global public health problem by 2050.

To that end, Stop TB is developing new tools to fight the disease and expanding access to existing treatment, including its inexpensive drug regimen DOTS, or directly observed therapy, short-course. With the organization's establishment of DOTS programs in the twenty-two countries with the highest number of cases, spending on TB control in those countries has increased some 50 percent, from $800 million to $1.2 billion. According to partnership officials, if the new plan is put into practice, some 50 million people will receive DOTS over the next ten years, including three million who have both TB and HIV and 800,000 who are infected with forms of TB that don't respond well to currently available drugs.

"This plan is important because it shows how much we can do with the tools we have today," said Dr. Peter Small, the Gates Foundation's senior program officer for tuberculosis and a member of the Stop TB coordinating board. "But it's also the case that our current tools are antiquated and inadequate, and in the long run we will not be able to win this battle without new tools."