The Trump administration's cuts to foreign aid could cost millions of lives around the world, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) warned Monday.
In the fight against AIDS alone, American decisions "could reverse 20 years of progress, leading to more than 10 million additional cases of HIV and 3 million HIV-related deaths, three times more deaths than last year," warned Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, during a press briefing in Geneva.
He called on the United States to "reconsider its support for global health."
To further illustrate the impact of Washington's withdrawal, Dr. Tedros cited other diseases as examples, such as malaria and tuberculosis.
"There are already serious disruptions in the supply of malaria diagnostics, medicines and insecticide-treated bed nets due to stockouts, delivery delays or lack of funding," the WHO chief explained.
Over the past two decades, the United States has helped prevent approximately 2.2 billion cases of malaria and 12.7 million deaths, he said.
He estimates that "if disruptions persist, we could see an additional 15 million cases of malaria and 107,000 deaths" in 2025 alone.
In the case of tuberculosis, 27 countries in Africa and Asia are facing "dramatic collapses" in their chains of prevention, care and surveillance.
"Nine countries have reported failures in the procurement and supply chains of tuberculosis medicines, putting the lives of people living with the disease at risk," said Dr. Tedros.
– The most generous-
The United States was previously the largest donor of foreign aid by far.
At the start of his second term at the end of January, Donald Trump announced a freeze on almost all of this aid for 90 days to review it before finally deciding to stop it for a large number of projects at the same time as he dismantled the development aid agency USAID and its budget of tens of billions of dollars.
The US administration "has, of course, the right to decide what it supports and to what extent," Dr. Tedros acknowledges, but "the United States also has a responsibility to ensure that, if it withdraws direct funding from countries, it does so in an orderly and humane manner, allowing them to find alternative sources of funding."
"We call on the United States to reconsider its support for global health, which not only saves lives around the world, but also makes the United States safer by preventing the international spread of epidemics," the WHO chief pleaded.
"If the United States decides not to restore direct funding to countries, we ask it to engage in dialogue with the affected countries" to find more sustainable alternatives "without disruptions that cost lives."
Dr. Tedros also called on other donors to step up their efforts.
"WHO has long called on all countries to gradually increase their domestic spending on health, and this is more important than ever," he insisted.
English 
French