ABUJA, Dec 4 (AFP) - African and international health experts gathered in the Nigerian capital Abuja on Sunday to launch a major conference on how best to break the deadly grip of the HIV/AIDS virus on the continent and care for its 24 million victims.
Hundreds of delegates gathered in the city's Eagle Square parade ground to hear the event's president Femi Soyinka give a speech calling for Africans, who include more than half of the world's HIV carriers, "to take our destiny firmly in our hand".
Delegates to the 14th International Conference on AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Infections in Africa (ICASA) will focus on how to spend the billions of dollars now being given to fight the disease and how best to combine the work of aid agencies, health ministries and churches.
"Since the last ICASA in 2003 in Nairobi, the money available for the AIDS response in sub-Saharan Africa has nearly tripled," said Peter Piot, executive director of the United Nations body coordinating the international response, UNAIDS.
"Because of this, the response to AIDS has entered the era of implementation," he added.
In two years the number of Africans with access to anti-retroviral drugs (ARVs), which are the only effective method of preventing the HIV virus developing into the fatal disease AIDS, has increased from only 75,000 to half a million, Piot told delegates.
"For the first time the political commitment exists to move towards universal access to HIV prevention ... but getting there will require that once more we change gear and further accelerate the response," he added.
Debates on halting the spread of AIDS are expected to reflect conflict between those who think promoting sexual abstinence for the unmarried is the best way to halt the spread of the disease, which is normally passed through intercourse, and those who feel this is unrealistic.
This disagreement -- which some observers feel stems from an ideological divide between Christian and secular groups as much as from a dispute over health care techniques -- has been made evident in the difference between the approach of the United States and the European Union.
Both these donors have increased the amount of money they are prepared to spend on AIDS prevention in Africa, but while the White House favours encouraging Africans to delay sex until marriage and to remain faithful, European leaders want to focus on promoting condom use.
In Africa the debate can often seem academic: governments say they need any help they can get.
Botswana's Health Minister Sheila Tlou said her country, which prides itself on having sharply reduced its AIDS prevalence rate, manages successfully to combine both approaches.
"Catholics are still preaching abstinence, not condom use. We say to them fine, practice abstinence, but ultimately you have to know some people are not abstaining and they need condoms," she told AFP.
Piot agreed: "Anything that has the word 'only' in it doesn't work for AIDS: only prevention, only treatment, only abstinence, only condoms, only male circumcision."
Delegates from the UN children's agency UNICEF said the "face of the African child" had been absent from such conferences for too long, given that the continent is home to 12 million AIDS orphans, a figure projected to rise quickly to 18 million.
"A lot of money has been spent on the fight against AIDS in general ... but we haven't put enough money into children," said Rima Salah, UNICEF deputy executive director.
The agency hopes the appeal it has just launched in favour of children with AIDS would be included in the ICASA final recommendations, she added.
Former US and South African presidents Bill Clinton and Nelson Mandela have been invited to ICASA, but it was not clear if or when they would arrive. Nigeria's President Olusegun Obasanjo will host the event after his return from a Sunday visit to Ivory Coast
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