Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1996. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.

Reuters NewMedia, Inc. - Monday December 2 6:22 PM EST
Evelyn Leopold

Addressing a World Aids Day conference at the United Nations, Taylor said a safe, effective and inexpensive vacine was the only way to combat AIDS in the United States and abroad. The United Nations has a combined agency program, called UNAIDS, launched last January.

"As long as there is such disparity between rich and poor there will never be a resounding solution to AIDS," she said. "We must address (it) in its social context, its global context, its political context."

She urged the U.S. government "to lead the charge and to assemble the best and the brightest with the sole intent of finding an HIV vaccine." She said only $130 million a year was spent globally for vaccine research.

"If therapies are too expensive for patients, we must change our national priorities to provide them. If health care delivery systems are broken or bankrupt, we must rebuild them," she said.

Taylor, the co-founder of the American Foundation for AIDS Research, said headlines suggesting the AIDS crisis was over were deceiving, particularly since the disease was spreading among women and the poor and in poor nations.

She said enthusiasm was growing for new a new class of drugs, such as protease inhibitors, that when used in combination with other drugs was changing some peoples' lives. But such research was still at its infancy.

"The cost and access will mean that these drugs will not be available to those that need them most. As a result terrible discrimination will occur, both in the United States and elsewhere between the rich and the poor, the haves and the have nots," she said.

In the United States, she said there were two classes of people living with AIDS: "those who can afford treatment and those who cannot. Is this something that we can bear?"

She said that 90 percent of the new infections today were among women and called for the research on a female condum that is cheap and easy to use or microbicides that can be used vaginally.

A recent U.N. report said more than 3 million people, most of them under 25 years of age, have become infected with the AIDS virus in 1996.

The new cases bring to nearly 23 million the total number who are infected. Since AIDS was discovered 15 years ago, 6.4 million people, including 1.4 million children, have died, with 1.5 million succumbing to the disease in 1996.

At a luncheon honoring Taylor earlier in the day, the actress recounted the difficulty she had organizing her first AIDS benefit in Los Angeles in 1984 because no one wanted to speak publicly about the disease. That was before the death of her friend and fellow screen star, Rock Hudson.

"I have never known rejection like that before in my life," she said. "Then Rock became sick and that really hit the town and people did start to get involved."

"I had no idea then I would be taking the first step on such a long and heartbreaking road," she said. "It isn't over yet. We need more than hope. We need you."
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