Donors should continue to provide AIDS funding to China, UNAIDS head says

Cutting AIDS funding to China will "be a big mistake for a donor and particularly, for anyone who's invested in China today, ... for the simple reason that this funding is a catalytic fund," UNAIDS Executive Director Michel Sidibe told Reuters in an interview on Monday.

Speaking in Beijing on the sidelines of "the first meeting of BRICS health ministers, made up of emerging markets of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa," Sidibe "rebuff[ed] critics who say the world's second-largest economy should no longer be a recipient of such aid," Reuters reports. "Sidibe said the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria was helping to bring innovation and make a difference in most-affected countries by establishing a new link among the government and civil society and NGOs to work together," the news service writes, noting that the "Global Fund has approved funding of $947 million to China, of which $369 million goes to fighting AIDS" (Wee, 7/11).