Panafrican News Agency - December 10, 2001

"Turning back the epidemic requires nothing more and nothing less than keeping the commitments that governments have made in the past year," Dr Piot, the UNAIDS executive director, told a news conference in Ouagadougou Tuesday.

"From the Abuja conference in April to the UN special session on HIV/AIDS in June, there have been ample promises of resources and political will. It is now time to turn those commitments into action."

Addressing journalists at the 12th International Conference on AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Infections in Africa (ICASA), Piot also pointed at the theme of the meeting, "The Community Commits Itself," to highlight the need to back commitments to stop aid with action on the ground.

"There is broad agreement that scaling up AIDS efforts from community to national level is essential to link local, district, national and regional decision-making, to overcome rural urban divides, and to involve all social and economic sectors in the response to AIDS," he said.

The Belgian doctor said that these efforts would cost money to effectively respond to the epidemic, adding that AIDS spending in developing countries must rise to 7-10 billion US dollars a year.

Current spending in sub-Saharan Africa is only a tenth of the 4 billion US dollars the continent needs.

Dr. Piot pointed out that there are many possible sources of funding for these efforts.

In addition to direct funding, for example, he emphasised that a greater proportion of the funds from debt relief should be targeted to HIV/AIDS.

Meanwhile, the United Nations Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, Stephen Lewis, said "scaling down disease can only take place by scaling up resources".

"The epidemic's magnitude is staggering and the world simply cannot afford not to move forward against AIDS. Preventing disease works best when government commit both their leadership and their resources, first in Africa, but also globally."

According to Lewis, the path towards bringing responses "to scale" has been significantly strengthened this year.

At last April's OAU summit in Abuja, UN secretary-general Kofi Annan called to a global fund to fight infectious diseases and issued a call to action setting priorities for the fight against AIDS. The Abuja meeting marked a turning point in Africa's response to AIDS.

OAU members pledged to allocate 15 percent of their national budgets to health in order to fight AIDS and related diseases.

Two months later the UN General Assembly convened a special session on HIV/AIDS at the highest political level.

Member states unanimously adopted a declaration of commitment setting goals and targets and succeeded in focusing the world's attention on the epidemic.

The past year has been HIV/AIDS move to the top of the world's development agenda.

In recent years, a number of African nations have also made real progress against the epidemic, both in terms of prevention and treatment.

UNAIDS believes greater need to be made to identify and disseminated successful experiences so that they might be applied nationally.

Meanwhile, AIDS killed 2.3 million people in sub-Saharan Africa, where there were an estimated 3.4 million new HIV infections last year, bringing the total number of Africans living with the virus to 28.1 million.

In 2001 alone, some five million people around the world were newly infected with HIV while three million died of the incurable AIDS.
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