OUAGADOUGOU, Dec 9 (AFP) - The 12th International Conference on AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Diseases in Africa (CISMA) opened here Sunday amid mounting demands for easier access to treatment on the continent worst-hit by the pandemic.
Some 6,000 delegates are attending the five-day meet in the Burkina Faso capital. The theme of the conference is community participation.
Burkina President Blaise Compaore in opening remarks stressed that the disease was a "major crisis retarding development in African countries" and rued the fact that the developed world had turned a blind eye to Africa's plight.
He regretted the fact that "medicines remained the domain of the North and the sick and ailing left to the South."
Compaore called for a "new solidarity" to fight the disease and asked the world community to collectively pitch in.
Peter Piot, chief of UNAIDS, said while "the undertaking to pay or reimburse medical expenses of the sick has shown significant progress, it is not enough."
Some 30,000 people in Africa have benefited from tritherapies, according to UNAIDS. However, the agency said the figure was "minute."
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.
The continent, which witnessed 2.3 million AIDS-related deaths this year, 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.
Piot said the access to health care for all "must start where the infrastructures function."
French Health Minister Bernard Kouchner, meanwhile, urged African nations to be more vocal in demanding treatment of AIDS and promised them France's assistance in this regard.
"If the countries of Africa do not themselves say they want the treatment, it is not us who can do that for them," Kouchner said.
Kouchner urged concerned nations actively to press their demands for treatment at a "crucial" meeting in Brussels next week on a UN move to create a global fund to fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.
He said French authorities wanted between 20 and 30 percent of the global fund to be spent on AIDS treatments, notably anti-retroviral drugs.
Former Ghana president Jerry Rawlings, currently a roving AIDS ambassador for the United Nations, said only 1.5 billion dollars had been pledged so far to the global fund to fight AIDS, a project announced by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.
Rawlings said it was "not a very optimistic figure" and warned: "Unless we do something about it now we will have a situation worse than the slave trade or World War II."
In rich countries, the arrival of tritherapies in 1996 revolutionised AIDS treatment -- a phenomenon which had virtually no impact in Africa due to the costs involved.
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.
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.
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