The US has stopped funding programs to combat polio, AIDS and malaria
The US is cutting funding for polio, HIV, malaria and hunger relief programs around the world. This week alone, the Trump administration has canceled 5800 contracts, according to The New York Times.
Photo: Africa © Lifeontheside | Dreamstime.com
Since February 26, the State Department has sent emails around the world to refugee camps, tuberculosis clinics, polio vaccination projects and thousands of other organizations that have received funding to do life-saving work.
"This agreement is terminated in the interests of the United States Government," the letters began.
The brief notices announced the end of funding for about 5800 projects funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), saying that the renegotiation process had been completed and that hopes for American aid were over.
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Many of these projects were initially exempted from the freeze because the State Department recognized their work as important and lifesaving.
“People will die,” said Dr. Catherine Kyobutungi, executive director of the African Centre for Population and Health Research, “but we will never know how many have died because even the programs that count the dead are closed.”
Among the projects that have lost funding are HIV treatment programs that served millions of people, malaria programs in the hardest-hit African countries, and global efforts to eradicate polio.
Among the cancelled projects:
- A $131 million grant for the polio vaccination program. UNICEF paid for the planning, logistics, and delivery of vaccines to millions of children.
- $90 million contract with Chemonics for mosquito nets, malaria tests and treatments that would protect 53 million people.
- A project led by FHI 360 that supports health workers' efforts to find starving children in Yemen. (It was recently found that one in five children in that country is critically malnourished due to the country's civil war.)
- All operating costs and 10% of the drug budget for the Global Drug Facility, the World Health Organization's main TB drug delivery channel. The fund treated nearly three million people last year, including 300 children.
- HIV care and treatment projects run by the Elizabeth Glaser AIDS Foundation provided life-saving drugs to 350 people in Lesotho, Tanzania and Eswatini, including 10 children and 10 pregnant women who were treated to prevent them from passing the virus to their babies at birth.
- A project in Uganda to track contacts of people with Ebola, conduct surveillance and bury those who died from the virus.
- A contract to manage and distribute $34 million in medical supplies in Kenya, including 2,5 million monthly courses of HIV treatment, 750 HIV tests, 500 courses of malaria treatment, 6,5 million malaria tests and 315 malaria nets.
- 87 shelters caring for 33 women victims of rape and domestic violence in South Africa.
- A project in the Democratic Republic of Congo that provides the only source of water for 250 people in displacement camps in the heart of the violence in the east of the country.
- Antenatal and postnatal health services for 3,9 million children and 5,7 million women in Nepal.
- A Helen Keller Intl-led project in six West African countries that last year provided more than 35 million people with medicines to prevent and treat neglected tropical diseases such as trachoma, lymphatic filariasis, schistosomiasis and onchocerciasis.
- A project in Nigeria that treats 5,6 million children and 1,7 million women for severe and acute malnutrition. Its closure means that 77 health facilities have stopped treating children with severe acute malnutrition altogether, putting the lives of 60 children under five at risk.
- A project in Sudan that provides functioning medical clinics in one of the largest districts in the Kordofan region. Now all medical services will be completely cut off there.
- A project serving over 144 people in Bangladesh, providing food to hungry pregnant women and vitamin A to children.
- A program led by the humanitarian organization PATH called REACH Malaria has protected more than 20 million people from the disease by providing antimalarial drugs to children at the beginning of the rainy season in 10 African countries.
- A Plan International-led project providing medicines and medical supplies, health care, famine treatment programmes, water and sanitation to 115 displaced or conflict-affected people in northern Ethiopia.
- More than $80 million for UNAIDS, the UN agency that funded work to improve HIV treatment, including data collection and service delivery monitoring programs.
- The President's Malaria Initiative, called Evolve, has been fighting mosquitoes in 21 countries through a variety of methods, including spraying insecticides inside homes (protecting 12,5 million people last year) and treating breeding sites to kill larvae.
- A project providing HIV and tuberculosis treatment to 46 people in Uganda, led by the Baylor College of Medicine Children's Fund (Uganda).
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- Smart4TB is a leading research consortium working on the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of tuberculosis.
- The Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) is a 90-country data collection project that has been an important, sometimes exclusive, source of information on maternal and child health, mortality, nutrition, reproductive health, and HIV infections.
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