JOHANNESBURG, Dec 1, 2006 (AFP) - Two ethical controversies flared into life on World AIDS Day on Friday as the United States and South Africa backed sexual abstinence in their mix of programmes to fight AIDS and British leader Tony Blair lashed at religious bans on condoms.
US President George W. Bush joined other leaders around the world in renewing a vow to combat a disease that has claimed more than 25 million lives in 25 years and for which a cure and vaccine remain dismayingly elusive.
Bush spelt out Washington's leading role as a funder for access to AIDS drugs in poor countries, but he also put a big emphasis on promoting abstinence.
That tactic is derided by many AIDS activists as moralising and unworkable, even potentially dangerous, for young people at the dawn of their sexual lives. These campaigners plead instead for sex education and access to condoms.
Fighting AIDS "includes the ABC approach, encouraging abstinence, being faithful, and using condoms, with abstinence as the only sure way to avoid the sexual transmission of HIV/AIDS," said Bush.
South Africa used World AIDS Day to announce a new national plan for AIDS, setting the goal of 2011 for halving the annual toll of new HIV infections.
It said it would launch awareness programmes in the hope of persuading teenagers aged 14-17 to "delay the initiation of sex."
"The future course of the epidemic hinges in many respects on the behaviour young people adopt and maintain," according to the plan, launched by Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka.
South Africa is next to India in the highest number of HIV infections in the world. In a country of 47 million, 5.5 million are living with AIDS or the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) which causes it.
In Britain, meanwhile, Prime Minister Blair hit out at religious bans on condoms, saying "if all the churches and religious organizations were facing up to reality, it would be better."
"The danger is if we have a sort of blanket ban coming from religious hierarchy saying it's wrong to do it, then you discourage people from doing it in circumstances where they need to protect their own lives," he said.
"The danger of them not doing so is that you get people who are sexually active and sometimes in circumstances where they may be forced into the sex trade, for example," he said.
Blair made the remarks as the Vatican is considering a 100-page report on condoms that has been requested by Pope Benedict XVI.
AIDS was first spotted in 1981 among a small group of American gays whose immune systems had been wrecked by an unknown virus.
Since then, it has killed at least 25 million people and nearly 40 million people today have HIV/AIDS, according to the UN agency UNAIDS.
Even though billions of dollars have been poured into research, there is neither a cure nor a vaccine.
And the distribution of drugs that curb HIV, transforming a killer disease into a manageable disease, is only now reaching a higher gear in Africa, where nearly two-thirds of infected people live.
In Geneva, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) on Friday said the AIDS pandemic would exact a growing toll on the workforce in the years to come.
In 2005, 3.4 million people of working age died of AIDS, and the toll is likely to rise to 4.5 million by 2020, it said.
"Twenty-five years into AIDS, nations rich and poor still think about the pandemic from an emergency perspective of quick fixes and short-term goals," UNAIDS Executive Director Peter Piot said in a commentary published by the Financial Times.
"But the AIDS pandemic is not just an emergency -- it is a long-run(ning) crisis spanning generations."
Countries in Asia -- a patchwork of countries that have fought AIDS for two decades and others where the epidemic is still at an early stage -- vowed on Friday to step up their action.
China vowed to promote condom use among its homosexuals, amid data showing only one Chinese gay in five uses them regularly.
"Prevention efforts among gays will be key to the country's AIDS control," said Wu Zunyou of the Chinese Disease Prevent and Control Centre.
In India, which has 5.7 million infected people, protestors demanded low-cost treatment for people in the later stages of the illness, while in neighbouring Bangladesh, a rally outside parliament in Dhaka drew a crowd of thousands.
In the Thai capital of Bangkok, a condom carnival was staged to promote a safe-sex message to young people, with dart-throwing to pop condom balloons, races to blow up condoms and demonstrations with mannequins on how to use a female condom.
The theme of this year's World's AIDS Day is accountability.
"Accountability... requires every president and prime minister, every parliamentarian and politician, to decide and declare that 'AIDS stops with me,'" said UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.
"And it requires every one of us to help bring AIDS out of the shadows and spread the message that silence is death."
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