Stop TB Partnership Proposes New $56B 10-Year Initiative; Gates Foundation To Increase TB Funding to $900M

The Stop TB Partnership on Friday released the Global Plan To Stop TB, 2006-2015 -- a new initiative that aims to prevent 14 million deaths from tuberculosis and treat 50 million people living with the disease over the next 10 years, Agence France-Presse reports (Agence France-Presse, 1/27). Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo and British Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown announced the plan at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. Full implementation of the plan would cost $56 billion, $47 billion of which would go toward control programs and $9 billion of which would be allocated for research and development. The plan strives to increase access to TB control programs and boost research on new therapies for the disease (AFP/Yahoo! News, 1/27). It also focuses on treating 800,000 people with multi-drug resistant TB, as well as three million people co-infected with TB and HIV. In addition, the plan envisions that the first new TB drug in 40 years will be available by 2010; that effective and affordable diagnostic tools to detect active TB will be available to doctors by 2010; and that a new safe and inexpensive vaccine against the disease will be available by 2015 (Agence France-Presse, 1/27).

Funding
The plan's proposed $56 billion implementation cost would be an increase of $31 billion over currently projected TB funding. Based on funding trends, the plan projects that the Group of Eight industrialized nations and other donor countries should supply 40% of the additional funding for the plan, and governments with high burdens of TB should supply the rest of the funds (World Economic Forum release, 1/27). Gates on Friday announced that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will increase its funding to tackle TB from $300 million to $900 million by 2015 to support the plan (Weber, BBC News, 1/27). Brown said he will urge the G8 nations to back the plan and make curbing the spread of TB a priority at their next meeting, which will be held in Moscow in July. Obasanjo said he also will make the topic a priority at a meeting of African leaders in May and urged the African Union to support the initiative (Moore, Associated Press, 1/27). In addition, Brown on Wednesday announced to the British Parliament that Britain plans to contribute $74.4 million to fight TB in India, whose 15 million TB patients make up about one-third of total cases worldwide (Reuters, 1/26).