"So far foreign aid has continued to go up and health as a percentage of foreign aid has continued to go up... In general, foreign aid has not yet gone down," he told reporters here.
He, however, said, "the real question is the next five years, because these rich governments deficits are huge and everywhere you look they are looking at cutting their budgets and the foreign aid piece might get cut. It's really hard to say."
Gates also said the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation did not work on solutions for non-communicable diseases and focused on such HIV, malaria and tuberculosis instead which infected the poor.
"We are involved in all the main infectious diseases. HIV is where we spend most of our money on. Malaria would be second, tuberculosis is third and then diarrhoea," he said.
He said his foundation was not working on geographical basis and promoted efforts to tackle a particular disease.
In Indian context, he said Multiple Drug Resistant TB is "scary".
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"On tuberculosis, we have to invent new drugs and we are working on a vaccine. Most of our work is on upstream science and better tools. We are also involved somewhat in TB delivery area... We are involved looking at using cell phones to track the issues and remind people. The key in TB is to diagnose people rapidly with a good diagnostic test," he said.
On NCDs, he said, "We basically don't work on Non- Communicable diseases. The reason for that is when there is a disease that rich people get, tens of billions of dollars are spent on it. On diabetes, the US drug industry is spending 15 Billion Dollars a year working on diabetes drugs. He said our Foundation and other UN agencies are nothing in front of the private sector investment...In no way will I allow working on NCDs."