AIDS funding committments from the G8 and other donors are in question. (M. Lakshman/Associated Press)

AIDS programs are being starved of funds worldwide, and if the trends continue, millions of people may die indirectly, a new report says.

The International Treatment Preparedness Coalition released the report, Rationing Funds, Risking Lives: World Backtracks on HIV Treatment, on Monday in Delhi, India, and Kampala, Uganda.

In a foreword to the report, Peter Mugyenyi, head of the Joint Clinical Research Center in Kampala, said he was seeing people there being denied treatment because funds were not coming through as promised.

"For the first time since 2004, some HIV-positive men and women who are in need of life-saving antiretroviral treatment are being turned away because of funding cuts," he said.

"Our greatest fear is that we may have to ration HIV medications for those already receiving treatment. How do you tell an HIV-positive mother that she can no longer have the drugs she needs to stay alive?"

The group, which advocates for access to HIV/AIDS treatments, calls for $20 billion US over the next three years to help meet the health-related Millennium Development Goals. Members of the wealthy G8 nations and other donors have said raising even $13 billion US, is a "huge stretch."

"Governments, north and south, cannot afford to put the clock back and return us to the days when HIV was a death sentence," Aditi Sharma of ITPC, co-ordinator of the report, said in a release.

The effects of government budget cuts and flatlined funding from the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria are already being felt in waiting lines for AIDS drugs in Uganda and Latvia and the struggle to afford medicines for opportunistic infections, transport costs and food.

"If this trend continues, the result will be suffering and death for millions of people around the world currently living with HIV and the millions more who will be newly infected this year and the years to come," said the report.

HIV-positive denied treatment

The report also looked at AIDS in India, Kenya, Latvia, Malawi, Swaziland and Venezuela.

A second report released Monday in London by the International Harm Reduction Association pointed to a shortfall in "harm reduction" measures like clean needle exchanges and providing condoms.

The group says these shortfalls are fuelling HIV epidemics in parts of Europe and Asia.

The proportion of new HIV cases linked to injecting drug use is 90 per cent in Bangladesh, 66 per cent in Russia and 50 per cent in Indonesia, the report said.

But the study found spending to try to stop the drug-related spread of the virus in low- and middle-income countries works out to only three cents per drug user per day.