U.N. Chief says world is losing battle with AIDS

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pixelpunter

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Posted: June 03, 2006 - 09:45 AM
Post subject: U.N. Chief says world is losing battle with AIDS

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/02/health/02cnd-aids.html?ex=1306900800 &en=12fed1f47ac66043&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

U.N. Chief Says World Is Losing Battle With AIDS

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By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
Published: June 2, 2006

UNITED NATIONS, June 2 — On the final day of a special session on the fight against H.I.V. and AIDS, United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan delivered a gloomy assessment, saying the world was losing the battle.

United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan addressed General Assembly today in a special session on the fight against H.I.V. and AIDS.

"The epidemic continues to outpace us," he told a jam-packed session of the General Assembly today. "There are more new infections than ever before; more deaths than ever before; more women and girls infected than ever before."

Mr. Annan, who is from Ghana and has made fighting H.I.V. a priority of his tenure, acknowledged some areas of progress since the last U.N. special session on AIDS in 2001: seven times as many people around the world now have access to treatment, he said, and in some African nations, the rate of infection is declining.

But he said that if countries "don't step up the fight drastically," the world would not be able to "reverse the tide." He called the spread of the disease "the single greatest reversal in the history of human development."

The United Nations is expected to adopt a new action plan at the close of the conference this afternoon.

The dark tone of Mr. Annan's remarks diverged markedly from the upbeat speeches by world leaders at the start of the 3-day session on Wednesday, and from the positive speech given immediately before his remarks by Laura Bush, the first lady.

"This is a hopeful moment in the fight against AIDS," Mrs. Bush began. She noted that the administration of her husband, President Bush, began a program in 2003 to contribute a total of $15 billion over 5 years to the international fight against AIDS.

"The American people are on track to meet or exceed that commitment," she said.

Not enough, Mr. Annan — the next speaker — seemed to say, as Mrs. Bush listened from the front row. "This fight requires every president, every parliamentarian to say, 'AIDS stops with me,' " he said.

The United States, the host country for the special session, has been roundly criticized by AIDS activists around the world for dispatching Mrs. Bush as its representative at the session, rather than a senior administration official. France and Brazil sent their foreign ministers, for example, and many African presidents are in attendance.

Mrs. Bush's 5-minute speech steered away from many of the criticisms that have been leveled against the United States's international AIDS policy, most notably that it seeks to promote sexual abstinence rather than scientifically proven approaches to stemming the spread of the virus, particularly condom use.

"The U.S. funds abstinence or abstinence-until-marriage programs that are ideologically driven and have nothing to do with reality," said Jodi Jacobson, president of the Center for Health and Gender Equality, an American advocacy group. "In a lot of places, teenagers are sexually active and married women are getting infected from their husbands."

Ms. Jacobson noted that at this week's session, American delegates pushed for the removal of phrases like "sex workers" or "men who have sex with men" from conference documents, preferring to refer to "vulnerable groups" instead. The United States has sided with Syria and Yemen in refusing to talk about "the empowerment of girls," she said.

Ms. Bush did not address such controversies. She made passing reference to the official U.N. program for AIDS prevention — known as ABC, short for Abstinence, Be-Faithful, and Condom use — by noting that "Africa's ABC model has led to dramatic declines in HIV" in some countries.

Mrs. Bush also suggested the creation of an international HIV testing day, and spoke of the way that wider availability of anti-AIDS drugs allowed people with HIV "a second chance at life."

But the three U.N. officials who spoke after Ms, Bush, including Mr. Annan, said that far too few people in Africa had access to such drugs, and that the U.N. was desperately short of the money needed to improve the situation.

The Global Fund to Fight AIDS Tuberculosis and Malaria, a war chest of money created after the 2001 conference, has helped more than 500,000 people to receive lifesaving cocktails of antiviral drugs, a number that has grown by 40 percent in the last 6 months.

But the World Health Organization estimates that as few as 1 in 6 people infected with HIV are able to get such drugs, because of the high cost.

The U.N. estimates that it needs $18 billion to combat AIDS in 2007 and $22 billion in 2008. At present, it has commitments for less than half that amount, according to Dr. Richard Feachem, head of the Global Fund.

"Public and private funding needs to be greatly expanded," Dr. Feachem said. "Let all countries contribute fully, according to their means."

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ChunLi

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Posted: June 06, 2006 - 04:29 AM

That really freaks me out.... and depresses me at the same time! (I'm not talking about how Mrs. Bush was sent to be the representative... but I could be).