This looks like a busy year for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. About a month ago, it joined Dow Jones Indexes in launching a new index, The Dow Jones Global Fund 50 Index. At about the same time, a total of US$1.7 billion in new grants was approved while Professor Michel Kazatchkine was reappointed as executive director.
Then last week the Global Fund came under fire in a piece by Roger Bate published in Foreign Affairs. A fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of “Making a Killing: The Deadly Implications of the Counterfeit Drug Trade” (Washington: AEI Press, 2008 – PDF version here, and overview in PPT given by Bate at the Wellcome Trust in October 2009), Bate tackles the endemic problem of stolen medicine in Africa and exemplifies the lack of accountability with the case of malaria drugs donated by the Global Fund, then stolen and sold again at hefty prices, in Togo starting in 2005 but only recently revealed.
Promising to clamp down on medicine fraud, the Global Fund is scheduled to draw up a combat plan this week, and might just heed Bate’s suggestion for the creation of an Interpol-like organization or mechanism.
