The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will donate $500 million to the 4-year-old Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria in a bid to increase the number of people in poor countries helped by life-saving medicines. The Gates Foundation will give the fund $100 million a year over five years, said Richard Feachem, the Global Fund’s executive director, in a conference call with reporters today. The donation may help the Global Fund secure other contributions at the 16th International AIDS Conference in Toronto, which begins in four days, Feachem said. The Gates Foundation, the world’s largest philanthropic organization, has donated $2 billion to AIDS research and treatment programs since it was founded in 2000. The grant will help the $9-billion Global Fund provide life-saving AIDS drugs in poor countries and ensure that 544,000 patients who already get medicine through the program remain on treatment. ‘We have made an unprecedented moral commitment to sustaining this treatment until death, which may be decades and we hope will be decades,” Feachem said on the conference call. ‘This sends a strong message about the importance of the sustainability and predictability of funds.” Before today, the Gates […]