InterPress News Service (IPS) - Monday, December 8, 1997
Melvis Dzisah

Some 4000 participants from 80 countries in Africa, Europe Asia, and The Americas are participating in the four-day conference (7- 11 Dec.), whose theme is 'AIDS and Development'. Thirty percent of the participants are AIDS patients or people living with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), which causes AIDS.

Ivoirian President Henri Konan Bedie in his opening address to the conference on Sunday, stressed that until Africa has adequate financial resources, there is very little that can be done to prevent the spread of AIDS.

Bedie urged African countries to contribute to the establishment of an African Fund, which would help to reduce the continent's dependence on external resources to fight AIDS.

The Fund, he added, could help to improve the "accessibility of the (African) population to AIDS/HIV treatments, (and) support research in discovering other adaptive treatments of the epidemic in an African context."

According to the United Nations AIDS agency (UNAIDS), more than 30 million people globally have been infected with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), which causes AIDS. Twenty million of those infected with the virus are in Africa.

There is no cure for AIDS, and according to the UNAIDS Executive Director Peter Piot, the delay in finding a cure is due to the squabbling among AIDS experts.

"If you ask 10 leading experts about the likelihood of finding a vaccine, five will say they have seen promising results and five will say that is all crap. Some scientists say a vaccine is not even possible...," Piot said.

"What we need to do is team up government and the private sector to make sure there are real incentives to work on this," Piot suggested.

The French President Jacques Chirac, who is attending the meeting, noted that AIDS has become a major threat to development worldwide.

He called on Europe to mobilise its resources to combat the spread of the epidemic, and he stressed that instead of only strategies for prevention, the developed world should make available to Africa the medicines now used to treat AIDS/HIV patients.

"We are told the medicines are expensive and out of reach for the poor. But the epidemic is planetary and no single country can close it's borders to it. There is therefore the need for a world strategy and action with global coordination," Chirac said.

Non-governmental Organisations (NGOs) working on AIDS in Africa held a series of pre-conference workshops which focused on the politics of combatting AIDS, and on the health rights of African children. (end/ips/md/pm97)

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