Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2002. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Sunday Times (Johannesburg) - August 30, 2002
Donwald Pressly
Piot, addressing a media conference at the World Summit on Sustainable Development, said meeting this goal would require "greater investment not only by donors but by developing countries themselves".
This underlined the need to build the capacity of developing countries to contribute by lightening the debt load of poorer countries.
UNAIDS noted that there were about 40 million people with HIV/Aids, 28 million of whom were living in sub-Saharan Africa. In two decades Aids has killed more than 20 million people.
"By 2020 unless concerted and effective action is taken now, another 68 million risk premature death in the 45 most affected countries.
Last year alone five million people were newly infected, 3.5 million of them in sub-Saharan Africa.
The Caribbean was the next most affected. In Zambia a study showed that two-thirds of the urban households that had lost their main breadwinner to Aids had seen their incomes fall by 80%.
"Aids can trigger food crises, even famine and up to 13 million people face possible starvation in southern Africa this year."
Piot noted that global consensus already existed on the urgency of fighting Aids.
The UN Special Session on HIV/Aids last year had seen world leaders unanimously adopt a declaration of commitment that provided a benchmark for action.
He noted that the declaration had already been endorsed in the action agenda of the world summit. In addition the Millennium Development Goals included the goal to half the spread of the disease by 2015.
Piot warned that if the world continued to allow Aids to drain human resources "at an increasing rate, sustainable development will be impossible.
Quite simply, if you don't survive, you cannot develop."
"The sobering reality is that in the countries most affected by the Aids epidemic we are at the beginning of a human resource crisis which will only get worse unless infected people are treated and prevention efforts are decisively scaled-up."
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