Miami Herald - June 7, 2006

Now the goal must be to convince individual nations to pony up the resources that they acknowledged will be needed to treat AIDS by 2010: $20 to $23 billion a year, or almost three times the $8.3 billion spent worldwide last year.

Half are women

In the 25 years since first was discovered, HIV/AIDS has infected more than 65 million people and killed nearly 25 million of them. Though the numbers of new infections have decreased in some 10 countries, including Haiti, the infections continue to grow worldwide. Of the 40 million people currently living with HIV/AIDS, nearly half are women (60 percent in sub-Saharan Africa), and few have access to the drugs that would keep them alive.

The U.N. meeting's final declaration commendably drew attention to the ''feminization'' of the disease and how women are made vulnerable by gender inequality. But it caved in to Islamic countries opposed to identifying other groups at high risk of contracting HIV, including homosexual men, sex workers and intravenous drug users. The declaration refers to ''vulnerable groups'' instead.

Such generalities and euphemisms only make a public-health threat worse by masking concerns that need special attention.

HIV/AIDS is now one of the world's worst pandemics ever. The disease has the power to devastate entire countries and economies, as evident in Africa. It respects no borders and neither sex. People of all ages, incomes and social classes are its victims. No country is immune from the ravages of AIDS.

U.S. funds welcomed

That's one good reason that the United States is the world's biggest anti-AIDS funder. To his credit, President Bush in 2003 pledged $15 billion over five years to 15 of the most affected countries. The aid has been welcomed. However, restrictive rules -- directing most prevention funds to programs promoting abstinence and barring funds for clean-needle programs for drug users, for example -- have limited the program's reach.

U.S. diplomats also opposed setting specific funding targets, which AIDS experts hoped would come out of the U.N. conference. New goals would have updated the targets for spending, treatment, testing and prevention set at the General Assembly's first AIDS meeting in 2001. While the 2001 goals were nonbinding and mostly unmet, they spurred huge increases in money and attention that helped turn the tide against this disease. Such sustained focus is critical against a killer pandemic.

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