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Aids research in poor countries faces large cuts next year because of
a shortfall in the World Health Organization’s funds. The rich nations that
pay for the WHO’s Global Programme on AIDS have so far provided only 35
million Pounds of the 50 million Pounds set for next year’s budget.

‘I can’t be optimistic that we’ll reach the target,’ said the programme’s
director, Michael Merson, after a meeting of the programme’s management
in Geneva last week. Merson is visiting a number of the donor countries
to try to raise more cash. ‘If we don’t get it by the end of the year we’ll
have to settle for what is euphemistically called a contingency budget,’
he said. This would involve cuts across the entire programme.

The budget for 1991 had planned only a modest increase of about 11 per
cent over last year’s figure, even though the WHO has revised its projections
of the scale of the pandemic sharply upwards. Officials say that up to 30
million people may be HIV-positive by the end of the decade, most of them
in the poorer countries.

The programme’s biggest donors over the past three years have been the
US, Sweden and Britain, who have given 32 million Pounds, 22 million Pounds
and 14 million Pounds respectively, as ‘unspecified funds’ – money for the
WHO to allocate to countries as it sees fit. By contrast, Germany has given
only 465,000 Pounds of unspecified funds in this period.

Some countries, including Germany, prefer to earmark their donations
for specific countries or projects. However, the total of earmarked funds
the programme receives in a year is only about 12.5 million Pounds and highly
variable. Although it welcomes any donations, the WHO prefers unspecified
grants. ‘We’d like to get more money from some of the more wealthy countries
– Germany, Italy and Japan for example,’ said Merson.