Investing more in ending TB is not only a moral imperative

The WHO urgently needs a revised if not new funding structure

- MUSHTAK PARKER

WHEN established and some of the wealthiest democracies start to callously weaponise funding for medical research, vaccination programmes and healthcare aid to developing nations as a tool of a highly ideologised but reckless foreign policy, the only winners are the billions of pathogens gorging themselves in an orgy of potential outbreaks, epidemics and pandemics.

You don't need a degree in virology or microbiology to understand the devastating socio-health consequences of blocking funding and resources, thus disrupting established and efficacious vaccination programmes against tuberculosis (TB), polio, HIV/Aids, measles and so on in some of the poorest countries.

In South Africa for instance, one of the most targeted countries, some 900 000 HIV patients are potentially affected by the abrupt and chaotic decision to axe funding for the US government’s HIV programme, known as the US President's Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar), launched in 2003 by then US president George W Bush, and distributed through Washington's main overseas aid agency USAID, itself in danger of being abolished or subject to massive budget cuts, thus obfuscating its delivery of groundbreaking schemes such as Pepfar that has enabled access of some of the world's poorest people to life-saving anti-retroviral drugs (ARVs) and has saved more than 25 million lives worldwide.

South Africa is one of the biggest beneficiaries of Pepfar, which contributes about 17% to its HIV/Aids programme, in which about 5.5 million people out of eight million living with HIV receive ARVs. Yet, almost five years since the onset of the “once-in-a-century” Covid-19 pandemic, which claimed in excess of 7.09 million lives, the world has regressed in its pathogen prevention programme strategy.