GENEVA: The sudden halt to US foreign aid funding has been \u201cdevastating,\u201d the UNAIDS chief said Monday, warning that without more funding, millions more will die and the global AIDS pandemic will resurge.
\nThe United States has historically been the world\u2019s largest donor of humanitarian assistance, but President Donald Trump has slashed international aid since returning to the White House two months ago.
\n\u201cIt is reasonable for the United States to want to reduce its funding over time, but the sudden withdrawal of life-saving support is having a devastating impact,\u201d UNAIDS executive director Winnie Byanyima told reporters in Geneva.
\n\u201cWe urge for a reconsideration and an urgent restoration of services, life-saving services.\u201d
\nShe warned that without more funding, \u201cthere will be an additional… 6.3 million AIDS-related deaths\u201d in the next four years.
\nAt the last count, in 2023, some 600,000 AIDS-related deaths were registered globally, she pointed out.
\n\u201cSo you\u2019re talking of a 10-fold increase.\u201d
\nAt the same time, Byanyima said her agency expected to see \u201can additional 8.7 million new infections.\u201d
\n\u201cYou\u2019re talking of losing the gains that we have made over the last 25 years. It is very serious.\u201d
\nLooking further ahead than the next four years, if aid funding is not restored, \u201cin the longer term, we see the AIDS pandemic resurging, and resurging globally,\u201d Byanyima said.
\n\u201cNot just in the countries where now it has become concentrated, in low-income countries of Africa, but also growing among what we call key populations in Eastern Europe, in Latin America,\u201d she said.
\n\u201cWe will see a… real surge in this disease. We\u2019ll see it come back, and we\u2019ll see people die the way we saw them in the \u201890s and in the 2000s.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
GENEVA: The sudden halt to US foreign aid funding has been \u201cdevastating,\u201d the UNAIDS chief said Monday, warning that without more funding, millions more will die and the global AIDS pandemic will resurge. The United States has historically been the world\u2019s largest donor of humanitarian assistance, but President Donald Trump has slashed international aid since …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":78840,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78832","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78832"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78832\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":78842,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78832\/revisions\/78842"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/78840"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}