UK Finance Minister pushes on TB, Vaccines

Gordon Brown, the UK Finance Minister, is pledged to making 2006 a year of delivery on the promises made in 2005.

Yesterday, Mr Brown announced that Britain will contribute £41.7 million to fight tuberculosis in India as part of a new multi-billion dollar fund to combat the disease worldwide.

The $5.5 billion (£3.14 billion) Global Fund to Stop Tuberculosis will be launched by the Chancellor alongside Mr Gates, whose Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is in the vanguard of efforts to tackle the scourge of lethal disease in the developing world.

Campaigners say that TB is responsible for killing 2 million people a year - one person every 15 seconds. India’s 15 million TB patients account for nearly one-third of the world’s cases.

If anti-TB efforts are not strengthened, an estimated 1 billion people will be infected by 2020 and 36 million people worldwide could die, the Treasury said.The global plan will call for a tripling of spending to fight the disease in the next decade to increase access to control programmes and accelerate research into ways of tackling the disease.

Mr Brown will also attempt to garner support for a separate initiative under which rich nations would agree to "block purchase" vaccines for diseases that blight the developing world in order to guarantee a flow of funds to the pharmaceutical industry to back research programmes.