GUWAHATI, India, Nov 19 (AFP) - The UN's top official on HIV/AIDS said Saturday there was an urgent global need to ensure funds and assistance actually reached those on the ground working to prevent the further spread of the disease.
"There is a crisis over implementation of programmes in defeating HIV/AIDS," UNAIDS director Peter Piot said.
"Our top priority is to make the money work and ensure that funds reach the people on the ground and are best used," Piot told a conference in Guwahati, the main city in India's northeastern state of Assam.
India's northeast is a region that has been ravaged by HIV/AIDS.
Piot said efforts must be aimed at mobilising "political momentum globally and to see that the fruit of investment helps in checking new infections."
He was speaking at a conference organized by India's Parliamentary Forum on HIV/AIDS in Guwahati.
"AIDS has become one of the greatest leadership challenges of our time worldwide and the need is to have a vibrant political leadership that could make bold decisions to contain the epidemic," Piot said.
"Today the issue of AIDS is in the same category as global warming or global terrorism and it is no longer an infectious disease alone."
The stigma and discrimination attached to AIDS is a major hindrance in controlling the epidemic, he said.
India accounts for about 5.13 million HIV-positive people, second only to South Africa.
India's northeast has been declared as one of the country's high-risk zones with close to 100,000 people infected with HIV.
"Instead of billboards warning against AIDS, a warm embrace by (a state chief minister) ... of a person living with HIV could make all the difference and be extremely productive in breaking the stigma," he said.
Authorities in the northeast fear the disease may spread further due to the region's acute drug problem.
India's northeast lies on the edge of the heroin-producing "Golden Triangle" of Laos, Myanmar and Thailand and estimates suggest there could be up to 300,000 injecting drug users here -- a key cause of HIV infection.
"UNAIDS is committed to supporting measures in fighting the disease in India and especially in the northeast as the region is surrounded by international borders" that make it more vulnerable," Piot said.
Lawmakers representing the region signed a declaration to fight the epidemic in the northeast aimed at coordinating care, prevention and monitoring of HIV/AIDS programmes by top-level political leadership.
"We have launched a war and we will fight jointly until we are able to reverse the trend," Assam state's chief minister Tarun Gogoi said.
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