World disease fund gets added $1.6 billion shot in arm

The Global Fund, a leading financier in the struggle against AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, expects to have an additional $1.6 billion to fund projects in 2012-2014, its new chief said on Wednesday, a turnaround from a funding freeze last year.

"It's a positive outlook where we did not have a positive outlook before," the Fund's General Manager Gabriel Jaramillo told Reuters.

The money includes funds from new donors, from traditional donors who are advancing their payments or increasing contributions and from some donors, such as China, that have offered to support projects in their own country to free up cash for more pressing needs elsewhere, Jaramillo said.

"It's the traditional donors that have made the difference. It is about recuperating trust and them being confident that they can satisfy their taxpayers that we are taking care with their money in these difficult times as well as we can."

Last November a lack of donor funds prompted the Global Fund to scrap new grants until 2014, triggering a crisis for agencies working to tackle AIDS around the world.

"TB" is short for a disease called tuberculosis. TB is spread through the air from one person to another. TB germs are passed through the air when someone who is sick with TB disease of the lungs or throat coughs, speaks, laughs, sings, or sneezes. Anyone near the sick person can breathe TB germs into their lungs.

TB germs can live in your body without making you sick. This is called latent TB
infection. This means you have only inactive (sleeping) TB germs in your body.
The inactive germs cannot be passed on to anyone else. However, if these germs
wake up or become active in your body and multiply, you will get sick with TB
disease.

Donor governments were strapped for cash after the financial crisis, but some also balked at reports that funds were being misused in four countries that received grants from the Global Fund and temporarily suspended their contributions.

Jaramillo took over earlier this year and has shaken up the 10-year-old organization to focus more on managing the grants that the Fund makes with donor money, with 75 percent of jobs now in grant management or strategic investment roles.

How many cases of tuberculosis (TB) were reported in the United States in 2010? A total of 11, 182 TB cases (a rate of 3.6 cases per 100,000 persons) were reported in the United States in 2010. Both the number of TB cases reported and the case rate decreased; this represents a 3.1% and 3.8% decline, respectively, compared to 2009. The number of reported TB cases in 2010 was the lowest recorded since national reporting began in 1953. Is the rate of TB declining in the United States? Yes. Since the 1992 TB resurgence peak in the United States, the number of TB cases reported annually has decreased. Case count and case rate declines in 2009 were considerably steeper than in recent years. During 2000-2008, the TB rate decreased an average of 3.8% annually, compared to a decrease of 11.3% in 2009.