Kazatchkine (Michel)

Executive Director of the World Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria since April 2007 / Representative of the Global Ambassador for the protection of mothers and children against the AIDS virus.

The young immunologist Michel Kazatchkine first encountered AIDS in 1983, when treating a young couple returning from Africa who suffered from a high temperature and immune deficiency. Since then, this doctor has made the fight against AIDS one of the lynchpins of his activity – first as Director of the French agency for AIDS research (1998-2005) and then as ambassador for the fight against AIDS and transmissible diseases (2005-2007), alongside his activity as doctor and professor of medicine at the Université René-Descartes in Paris. In April 2001, at the summit of Heads of State on AIDS in Abuja (Nigeria), Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the United Nations, called for creation of an international fund to fight the disease. A public-private partnership was then proposed in Brussels, outside the UN system. This was the birth of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria – the world’s three most deadly diseases – in January 2002. From February 2002 to December 2004, Michel Kazatchkine chaired the Global Fund’s review committee. Since, April 2007, he has been in charge of the structure, and has been fighting to prevent the hecatomb: more than six million people, in the developing countries particularly, die every year from these three pandemics. The Global Fund guarantees two-thirds of international funding for fighting tuberculosis and malaria, and one-quarter of the resources available to fight AIDS (55% of funds allocated to AIDS, 35% to malaria and 10% to tuberculosis). “Up until the 1980s, we believed that to help a country develop we had to focus on electrification, water purification or education”, the Global Fund’s director recently told the magazine La Recherche. “Health was seen as the natural consequence of development. Then the AIDS crisis came along. (…) We had to wait until the second half of the 1990s to finally recognize the seriousness of the crisis in the developing world, and more particularly in Africa. The economies of many countries were undermined, families destroyed, children no longer attended school because they had to do the work of sick parents or look after their orphaned brothers and sisters. It was obvious that if we did not treat victims of AIDS, there would no longer be anyone to work for development! Health then became a priority and a political challenge”.