October 5, 2007

Will Lifesaving AIDS Funds Land in India?

Activists, health advocates and people living with HIV/AIDS have written a memorandum urging Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to join UNITAID, an international drug-purchasing initiative, to remedy likely AIDS funding shortages.  UNITAID would also help the country generate money to fight other diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis.

France, Brazil, Chile, Norway and Brazil created UNITAID, which is overseen by the World Health Organization (WHO), in September 2006. (The United States is not a member.) It uses a levy on airline tickets to generate money for drugs. UNITAID gets one or two dollars from each ticket purchased; it has collected over $300 million so far.

India has 450 airports and 12 domestic airlines. It also has the third-largest population of people living with HIV in the world, with 700,000 people in need of treatment.  

“In countries like India, most of the fund generated from air tickets can be pumped back into drugs for India’s unwell population,” says Sundar Sunderaraman, an Indian physician.