GORDON BROWN will throw his weight behind moves to tackle fatal diseases in developing countries today when he uses a visit to the World Economic Forum to try to confront claims that the rich economies have failed to fulfil their pledges to the poor.

The Chancellor will take part in a series of high-profile meetings and appearances in Davos with leading development campaigners including Bono, the rock star, and Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft.

Mr Brown hopes that his appearance at the forum will give added momentum to his efforts to secure new measures on debt relief from the Group of Seven leading economies, which will gather in Moscow next month.

But the Chancellor is expected to come under fire in Davos from Bono and other campaigners over Britain’s decision to accept $1.7 billion in debt repayments from Nigeria under a deal with the Paris Club of rich donor countries to write off part of the African state’s $30 billion (£17 billion) of debts.

Development groups believe that Britain should not take the money from a country which, despite being the world’s third- largest oil producer, still suffers from endemic poverty.

Yesterday Mr Brown announced that Britain will contribute £41.7 million to fight tuberculosis in India as part of a new multibillion-dollar plan to combat the disease worldwide.

The $5.5 billion-a-year anti-TB plan will be launched today by the Chancellor alongside Mr Gates, whose Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is in the vanguard of efforts to tackle the scourge of lethal diseases in the developing world.

TB is one of the world’s deadliest diseases and campaigners say that it is responsible for killing two million people a year — one person every 15 seconds. India’s 15 million TB patients account for nearly one third of the world’s cases.

The global plan will call for a tripling of spending to fight the disease in the next decade to increase access to control programmes and accelerate research into ways of tackling the disease.

Today Mr Brown will also attempt to win support for a separate initiative under which rich nations would agree to “block purchase” vaccines for diseases that blight the developing world in order to guarantee a flow of funds to the pharmaceutical industry to back research programmes.

This morning Mr Gates and the Chancellor will brief forum participants on the progress of the international finance facility for immunisation — a scheme under which donor countries provide guarantees of a future stream of funding in order to raise cash through capital markets to pay for vaccine research and programmes of vaccination in the Third World.

Mr Brown will join Bono and Paul Wolfowitz, the President of the World Bank, to discuss efforts to give greater priority to universal free education for children across the globe.