United Press International - Sunday, 9 July 2000
Michael Smith, UPI Science News

"We need -- at a minimum -- $3 billion a year to have an impact," said Peter Piot, executive-director of the United Nations Joint Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS). "Let's get serious about the funding for fighting AIDS."

Current spending in Africa, he said, is about $300 million a year on prevention and basic AIDS care, an amount that does not include the most advanced drug treatment. Meanwhile, African nations pay about $15 billion a year on international debts -- debts Piot said should be cancelled.

Piot made the call for more money and debt cancellation at a news conference during the first day of the 13th International AIDS Conference and repeated it later, during the official opening ceremonies.

He called on governments in the developing world to spend more on AIDS, and governments elsewhere to increase their contributions. "We appeal to the international community to guarantee that no country should fail in its fight against AIDS due to lack of resources," he said.

"The time has come," he said, "to turn the tide on AIDS here in Africa and globally."

Piot's call for $3 billion a year came a day after reports of a new $500-million World Bank program for fighting AIDS in Africa, which is home to two-thirds of all cases of the disease. The money, in the form of 40-year loans, would be available to any African country that sets up a national AIDS program.

More than 24 million Africans are either HIV-positive or have full-blown AIDS, the largest share of the 34.3 million world-wide.

Piot said this AIDS conference is "really different" because it is the first held in the developing world. As well, he said, there is new hope because studies show that HIV prevention works to slow the progress of the AIDS epidemic.

But his words came only a few days after UNAIDS released a sobering study, showing that nations in sub-Saharan Africa -- with a few exceptions -- are losing the battle against AIDS. In South Africa, in particular, nearly one person in five is HIV-positive.

In some other countries -- such as Zimbabwe and Lesotho -- nearly 25 per cent of the population is HIV-positive.

Hoosen Coovaria, a South African physician and chairman of the conference, said the conference is "unprecedented" because of the interplay of science and politics that has surrounded it. But, he said, that's not necessarily a bad thing: "There is no absolutely pure science without some interaction with society," Coovaria said.

The International AIDS Society, which sponsors the biennial meetings, was criticized for choosing Durban, initially because it is difficult to reach from many places and has limited facilities for a meeting of more than 10,000 people.

But later the conference faced threats of a boycott, after South African President Thabo Mbeki voiced doubt that HIV is the cause of AIDS and convened a panel of scientists to discuss the issue.

"It may be inevitable that when you bring a conference like this to a developing country, you run into these sorts of issues," Coovaria said. "I guess the worst thing is to be ignored and we certainly weren't ignored."

One sidelight of the dispute between scientists and Mbeki came Sunday when a news conference by organizers of the so-called Durban Declaration was cancelled suddenly and without explanation.

The Durban Declaration -- signed by more than 5,000 scientists world-wide and published in the prestigious journal Nature -- said that the debate over the cause of AIDS was settled, and added any further discussion costs needless lives.

A spokesman for Mbeki responded angrily that the declaration was an example of "intolerance."

Rumors circulating in the conference Sunday said the news conference had been cancelled after pressure on South African organizers from the government, but Peter Hale, a spokesman for the organizing committee, refused to comment.

"It's a very unexpected turn of events," he said.
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