September 16, 2010 New York, NY, September 20, 2010—World
leaders assessing progress of the United Nations Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs) in New York this week could transform
the fight against two of the leading causes of childhood
deaths—malnutrition and HIV/AIDS—by implementing an innovative
funding mechanism for global health, the international medical
humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans
Frontières (MSF) said today. The World Health Organization
reports that an additional $37 billion needs to be spent on
global health every year by 2015 in order to meet the health-
related MDGs. The intergovernmental Leading Group recently
estimated that a financial transaction tax—a levy as little as
0.005 percent on transactions of the world’s four most traded
currencies—could generate an estimated $33 billion a year to
implement the latest medical advances against global health
threats, including malnutrition and HIV/AIDS. “For many
diseases, we know what we need to do to save lives,” sa