“A global pullback on commitments to fund and fight AIDS is resulting in restrictions on the number of people being enrolled into treatment programmes, more frequent drug shortages, and reduced national AIDS budgets,” according to a report (.pdf) released Monday by the International Treatment Preparedness Coalition (ITPC), BMJ News reports.

The Wall Street Journal examines upcoming changes to the global strategy to eradicate polio with a focus on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s role in fighting the disease. “[O]rganizations behind the polio fight,” which include the WHO, UNICEF, Rotary International and the CDC, “plan to announce a major revamp of their strategy to address shortcomings exposed by” the increasing number of polio outbreaks in “countries believed to have stopped the disease.” The plan is expected to be announced next week.

“Sixteen countries in West and Central Africa are in the throes of a measles outbreak, at a time when there is a shortfall in funding for vaccination campaigns against the disease, two U.N. agencies said in a joint statement on Thursday,” Reuters AlertNet reports (Fominyen, 4/22).

Lancet Editorial Argues Global Health Community ‘Too Complacent’ On Development Of An Effective, Affordable Malaria Vaccine   “What is still needed [to fight malaria] is the only tool that has ever truly conquered any infectious disease: an effective and affordable vaccine. And here, the global malaria community has been too complacent,” a…

Representatives of the African Union (AU) on Wednesday began meeting with members of the Obama administration in Washington, as part of the first Annual U.S.-African Union High Level Bilateral Meetings, United Press International reports (4/21).

Geithner, Gates Announce New Global Agriculture And Food Security Program In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner and Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, announce the launch of the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program, a fund “to help the…

An ActionAid report (.pdf) released on Wednesday recommends that major aid donors increase their support of small-scale farms run by women in developing countries to maximize the chance of meeting the U.N. Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving hunger by 2015, Reuters reports.

The world is on track to meet the poverty reduction target of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), but sub-Saharan Africa still lags behind, according to the World Bank’s World Development Indicators 2010 report, released Tuesday, VOA News reports (Hennessey, 4/20).

A group of health experts gathered in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Monday, to kick off a continental conference on maternal and child health, VOA News reports (Heinlein, 4/19).

Global funding for malaria reached $1.7 billion in 2009, a “ten-fold” increase since 2004, and the production of insecticide-treated nets (ITNs) worldwide rose to 150 million last year, according to a report, released Monday, from UNICEF and the Roll Back Malaria (RBM) partnership, which also highlighted the need for additional funding, Agence France-Presse reports (4/19).