The Associated Press - Wednesday, September 15, 1999

The statistics came in support of a challenge from the U.N. Children's Fund for African governments, which spend more on defense than on health, to recognize AIDS as Africa's real "killing field."

"By any measure, the HIV-AIDS pandemic is the most terrible undeclared war in the world," said Carol Bellamy, executive director of UNICEF. Speaking on the third day of Africa's largest AIDS conference, Bellamy said decades of gains for child survival and development were being wiped out across the continent by the disease.

The threat has been worsened by the lack of commitment from political leaders to fight AIDS, resulting in a "conspiracy of silence" to hide the seriousness of the crisis from ordinary people, she said.

More than a quarter of adolescent women south of the Sahara -- the group most at risk from infection with the HIV virus that causes AIDS -- were unaware of even one effective way of avoiding the disease, research has shown. In southern Africa, more than 30 percent of young women felt a healthy-looking person could not be a carrier, a study showed. Up to 90 percent of HIV carriers are unaware they are infected.

Bellamy said African governments must make community education a top priority and recognize "the capabilities of communities and the poor to help themselves."

She challenged policy makers to set goals for the year 2002 that would include:

-- Making adolescent women aware of the risks of AIDS and ways to protect themselves.

-- Giving up to 70 percent of women at prenatal clinics access to voluntary and confidential testing.

-- Encouraging HIV-positive mothers to seek treatment to arrest mother-to-child transmission.

-- Making sure that local governments can better provide food, education and basic health care for the 13 million children expected to be orphaned by AIDS in the next 18 months.

"We can achieve these goals only with the sustained support of officials at the highest level," Bellamy said.

UNICEF, she said, was moving to strengthen its support for regional governments and she called for greater help from international donors.

In Lusaka on Tuesday, the World Bank announced it had given new priority to AIDS programs in its $3 billion annual development loans to sub-Saharan Africa, putting AIDS "center stage" in African lending policies, spokeswoman Debbie Zwedie said.

The United States spends $880 million fighting about 40,000 new AIDS cases a year. All of Africa spends about $150 million fighting 4 million new cases a year, and only one-tenth of the expenditure came from governments, Bellamy said.

"This is simply unacceptable," she said.

Africa accounts for two-thirds of the world's 31 million HIV-AIDS cases. The pandemic has claimed about 11 million lives.

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