OUAGADOUGOU, Dec 10 (AFP) - The 12th International Conference on AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Diseases in Africa (CISMA) goes into a second day on Monday, with mounting demands for easier access to treatment on the continent worst-hit by the pandemic at the centre of discussions.
The five-day meeting in the Burkina Faso capital, attended by some 6,000 delegates, is on the theme of "community solutions" to a disease which has taken its main grip on the African continent.
In 2000, UNAIDS said 70 percent of the 33 million people living with HIV, the virus that can lead to AIDS, lived in sub-Saharan Africa.
Only a "minute" number - some 30,000 people in Africa -- have benefited from tritherapies, it said.
The continent, which witnessed 2.3 million AIDS-related deaths this year, also accounts for 70 percent of global fatalities.
UNAIDS said in the absence of proper treatment, the majority of 28.1 million Africans living with HIV are not expected to survive the present decade.
When opening the meeting on Sunday Burkina President Blaise Compaore called for solidarity, describing the disease as a "major crisis retarding development in African countries", to which the blind world was turning a blind eye.
Medicines, he said, were "the domain of the North and the sick and ailing left to the South."
Despite the signing of several pacts between African countries and leading global pharmaceutical companies for cheaper medicines, especially anti-retroviral drugs, access to treatment for the average African is still limited and way too expensive.
Compaore called for a "new solidarity" to fight the disease and asked the world community to collectively pitch in.
UNAIDS and the World Health Organisation (WHO) said in their annual report on the pandemic released last month that in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Nigeria and Togo, at least five percent of the population aged 15-49 has HIV or full-blown AIDS.
In 16 other countries, the rate is at least one in 10. Worst of all is southern Africa, where in Botswana more than one in three of the nationwide adult population is infected.
Global conferences are held every two years. The next will take place in Barcelona, Spain, in July.
Peter Piot, chief of UNAIDS, said on the first day of the conference that while "the undertaking to pay or reimburse medical expenses of the sick has shown significant progress, it is not enough."
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