Donor funding priorities for disease control

Health policy scholars largely have ignored the questions of which developing world diseases donors prioritize, and why differential treatment across diseases exists. To investigate these issues, I classify all reported donor projects from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) for infectious disease control from 1976 to 2000, present funding totals by disease, and examine evidence for a set of hypotheses concerning determinants of funding patterns. No infectious disease has received more than minimal attention by the group of advanced industrial states. However, some diseases have received considerably greater priority than others. OECD data indicate that HIV/AIDS received nearly two-thirds of all donor funding targeted for infectious disease control in the 1990s, although the disease represented just over one-quarter of the burden among the diseases considered in this analysis. Acute respiratory infections stand as the most neglected set of diseases, posing nearly as high a burden as AIDS but receiving less than a penny of donor funding for each healthy life-year lost in the developing world. Consideration of the seriousness of the crises explains some of the variance in donor funding levels across diseases. However, advanced industrial interests also likely have great influence on funding distributions.