Bangkok Post - June 7, 2006

Thailand's UN Ambassador, Laxana Laohaphan, who participated in the talks, said the meeting was not intended to come up with a concrete plan but to get nations to come up with their own plans to get universal access to Aids treatment by 2010. "It is only a political declaration," she said.

But US first lady Laura Bush took the initiative when she told the General Assembly that people must understand how the deadly virus is transmitted. She called on countries to improve literacy so their citizens can make better choices. That is fine, but the fact is that the information being given also has to be more accurate and definitive than it has been in the past, and that is where this meeting failed.

Unfortunately, employees of the United Nations in departments like the World Health Organisation, have their own agenda. By keeping the Aids issue high up in the world's governments' corridors, and therefore their funding budgets, they secure their future employment. Add to this various governments' political and religious concerns and it soon becomes difficult for the average person to decipher if they are at risk of Aids or not. A UN report released to coincide with the meeting said that 40 million people worldwide are living with HIV/Aids, and 8,000 die every day from it. Shocking figures indeed. But what every person in the world wants to know is: are they at risk of getting Aids?

Even Britain's development secretary, Hilary Benn, said he wished the document could have been more truthful. And Britain ranks second behind the United States in the amount of funding it gives to Aids. Mr Benn was right in criticising the declaration for not spelling out the ways the virus is transmitted and for allowing certain myths to perpetuate.

The final document states that Aids mainly affects "vulnerable groups" but fails to mention that these groups are homosexual men, drug users and prostitutes. The United States rejected a paragraph because it called for "harm reduction", a euphemism for needle exchanges successfully established in some countries for drug users, which Washington opposes.

The Centre for Health and Gender Equity, which says it represents nearly 70 international advocacy groups, denounced the document for failing to show greater political leadership while ActionAid International said "it is incomprehensible how negotiators could come up with such a weak declaration".

It is time for our world leaders to hide their embarrassment and political agendas and be frank. Besides injecting drug users and poor medical practices in poverty-stricken countries, our leaders need to state that transmission of Aids, both male to male and male to female, is almost always via anal sex. Research by the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and by the University of Tuebingen in Germany shows that anal sex, both heterosexual and homosexual, is the second-biggest cause of HIV transmission. Other studies suggest the transmission from an infected male to female via vaginal sex is only about 10 in 10,000 while transmission from infected females to males could be just five in 10,000. Studies also suggest that these few vaginal sex transmissions could be due to the fact that one partner has a sexually transmitted disease at the time, allowing transmission through an open sore.

But condom companies which benefit financially, and technocrats who get to keep their jobs, are certainly unwilling to publicly divulge this type of information and instead use less descriptive language which is being too easily misconstrued by the world.

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