KATHMANDU, Dec 4 (AFP) - More than 140 religious leaders from South Asia gathered Thursday in Kathmandu to chart out ways to halt the spread of AIDS among the region's young people.
The three-day meeting, organized by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), will draft recommendations to be presented to South Asian leaders at their January 4-6 summit in Islamabad.
Religiously diverse South Asia has around five million people with AIDS or HIV, the virus that leads to the disease, with India accounting for 90 percent of cases, according to governments' figures.
UNICEF Regional Director Sadig Rasheed said the number of drug users and sex workers with HIV or AIDS in South Asia had doubled in the past decade.
Rasheed called for efforts to control the disease's spread "at a war-footing, with the cooperation of all religious leaders and the leaders of the nations."
"We know that the virus should have been controllable. But we also know of success stories of controlling and averting the trend of the disease such as in Uganda and in Thailand," Rasheed said.
The meeting includes clerics and leaders of faith-based groups from four Muslim countries -- Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Maldives and Pakistan -- along with predominantly Hindu India and Nepal and Buddhist-majority Bhutan and Sri Lanka.
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