Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2001. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.

Reuters NewMedia - Tuesday December 11, 2001
Mathieu Bonkoungou

"In Africa it would require $5 billion to organize effective prevention, to care for people living with HIV and to support AIDS orphans," Peter Piot, executive director of the umbrella group UNAIDS , said late Monday.

Speaking to reporters on the margins of an African conference on AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases in Burkina Faso's capital Ouagadougou, Piot said current spending on fighting AIDS on the continent was just $500 million.

An estimated 40 million people around the world have HIV, and nearly three quarters of them live in Africa.

Piot said money to fight AIDS should come from national budgets of African countries, foreign donors, loans and the $7 to $10 billion fund proposed by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan at a UN special assembly on AIDS in June.

Commitments to the fund have fallen far short of the target.

The Ouagadougou conference, the 12th International Conference on AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Diseases in Africa (ICASA), brings together more than 4,000 AIDS experts and health workers from Africa and elsewhere.

It has focused on the need to treat people carrying the HIV virus, which causes AIDS, as well as prevention. Piot told the opening session Sunday that only 30,000 people in Africa out of more than 28 million infected were receiving the antiretroviral drugs which can delay the onset of AIDS in people with HIV.

Piot welcomed reductions in the prices charged by some major AIDS drug producers earlier this year following pressure from AIDS lobby groups, but said that it was not enough.

"It's an important step, but it is insufficient and there is still a lot of work to do," Piot said.

"The phase of planning and small pilot projects is over," he added. "I am telling the communities, young people and those living with HIV to stand up and be counted."

Stephen Lewis, Annan's special representative for AIDS in Africa, said donors must put up funds to fight AIDS, which is estimated to have killed 2.3 million Africans in 2001.

"Africa is now mobilized to apply all the plans which have been drawn up, but this requires donor funds, and that money is not yet there," he told the opening session.

"I would like to remind everybody that between 3,000 and 4,000 people died in the atrocious terrorist attack of September 11, but double that number, between six and eight thousand people, die (of AIDS) each day in sub-Saharan Africa," he said.

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