Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1995. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
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The New York Times - Sunday, December 3, 1995
Barbara Crossette
The director of a new program to coordinate and strengthen the work of the United Nations in battling the spread of AIDS has an odd assortment of allies: a prostitutes' union in Calcutta, the Thai Army and a grass-roots group in Uganda that is teaching women to move beyond their traditional roles and become militant in the name of prevention.
Such pockets of hope are small and scattered, said the director, Peter Piot of Belgium, but they demonstrate the lesson he wants to deliver to the developing world, where more than 90 percent of H.I.V.-infected people live.
We now have very good evidence that prevention brings real results," Dr. Piot said in an interview on Thursday. It works best, he added, when programs fit the needs of people in specific cultures. Dr. Piot was in New York to speak about the program in a United Nations panel discussion on World AIDS Day on Friday.
In Thailand, where discussion of sex is frank and open, business leaders and military officers have successfully promoted AIDS prevention programs in a country that once seemed headed toward a health catastrophe. Now, Dr. Piot said, Thailand has areas where no new infections are occurring in men under 25. But he cautioned that in general Southeast Asia still has one of the world's fastest growing infection rates.
India remains another high-risk area, he said. But in Calcutta, where political and labor militancy is strong, prostitutes enlisted the support of public health officials for their organization by advocating a campaign against unprotected sex.
The intersection of AIDS prevention and women's rights is inevitable, Dr. Piot said, as is the recognition that AIDS prevention cannot be separated from overall development in poor countries.
"It's not enough understood that AIDS is more than a health problem," he said. "All agencies involved in development should have AIDS on their agenda. You have to be blind not to see the connection."
He said United Nations officials are often in as much as a state of denial as governments that say AIDS is a "foreign" disease.
Dr. Piot said one of his primary goals is to introduce AIDS awareness in all the United Nations agencies connected to his program: Unicef, the United Nations Development Program, the United Nations Population Fund, Unesco, the World Bank and the World Health Organization. They will be urged to pool resources to avoid what he calls "overlap, gaps and turf fights."
Dr. Piot is to open an office for UNAIDS, as the program is called, in Geneva in January and it plans to station teams of experts in individual countries or regional centers to advise governments and local private organizations as well as to provide technical and financial support.
Thirty-six nations have already established centers for coordinating AIDS efforts, he said.
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