Funding priorities blasted by HIV/AIDS envoy

Following major pledges for Iraq's reconstruction, AIDS and development officials are concerned that donor countries could come up short on funding the global AIDS budget. Officials have argued that funds for Iraq, which currently stand at US $33 billion for the next four years, were nearly 10 times the amount pledged to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. In a recent interview with the Associated Press, UN special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, Stephen Lewis, said the pledges for Iraq was a "weird, discordant upset in the scales of justice". "I don't deny that Iraqis are under stress and numbers of them are dying tragically. But I am forced to point out that more than 2 million Africans are dying of HIV/AIDS every year, and their poverty is vastly more wretched," Lewis said. While Iraq is a middle-income country of about 25 million people, research shows that there are at least 42 million people living with HIV/AIDS worldwide.