Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
Although it faces an escalating epidemic, Russia stands to lose tens of millions of dollars in international AIDS funding because the World Bank has reclassified it as an upper middle-income country, officials said Friday.
Non-governmental groups that rely largely on funding from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria warn that the cutoff will make anti-AIDS efforts dangerously dependent on the Kremlin.
The fund will disburse more than $200 million for AIDS and tuberculosis programs in Russia between now and 2011, but it cannot issue new HIV grants as a result of the reclassification, fund spokesman Jon Liden said.
