David Brown | Geneva | November 23

WaPo - The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which underwrites AIDS treatment for about half the people getting it in developing countries, announced Wednesday that it will make no new grants for the next two years because of the worldwide economic downturn.

The Geneva-based organization says it will continue to support about 400 AIDS treatment and prevention programs in more than 100 countries for now, but it will not pay for them to add patients or increase services.

“We cannot at the moment encourage in good faith an expansion of these programs,” Christoph Benn, the fund’s director of external relations, said Wednesday after a two-day meeting in Ghana of the board’s directors.

The decision comes at a time of growing clamor to scale up AIDS treatment in countries hardest hit by the disease, especially nations in sub-Saharan Africa.

A study earlier this year showed that treating infected people with antiretroviral drugs cuts their chance of transmitting the virus by 96 percent — leading to calls for a “treatment-as-prevention” strategy against the epidemic.