Pursuits
Gates-Backed Fund Halts New Grants as Crisis Hurts Giving
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The world’s biggest disease-fighting fund canceled its next round of grants as the global financial crisis crimps donations and threatens its ability to curb the spread of the world’s deadliest infections.
The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which has spent or committed to spending $22 billion since 2002 on preventing and treating disease, will only have enough money to pay for essential services for existing programs through the end of 2013, the Geneva-based fund said in a statement today. It will not make new grants until 2014, when it expects to have raised additional money for the 2014-2016 funding cycle, Andrew Hurst, a spokesman, said in a telephone interview.