Wall Street Journal Blog - August 4, 2008
Posted by Marilyn Chase

Keren Dunaway-Gonzalez, a 12-year-old Honduran who earlier fought a case of nerves amid a press room scrum, took a breath and steadied her voice to tell several thousand delegates about something else she fights: HIV.

When she was an even littler girl, her parents explained with drawings how she has carried the virus since birth. When she was 9, she began visiting schools with her parents to tell her story. She went on to launch a kids' magazine to help others like her charting an uncertain adulthood in the epidemic.

As youth representative to the biennial meeting, she asked help for "los ninos con VIH," or the children with HIV, in getting care without violence or recrimination. Sunday night, she owned the crowd.

After the ovation in her wake, what could Mexican President Felipe Calderon do but pledge AIDS care to all in need?

What could UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon do but challenge all nations to follow the United States in lifting its ban on foreign visitors with HIV/AIDS?

This conference is partly about dreams of swift return to what former Botswana President Festus Magee Sunday called "an AIDS-free generation." But UNAIDS Executive Director Peter Piot cautioned, "Let's be realistic. The easy bit is over."

"If we thought the first phase was hard, we must be prepared for tougher times ahead," Piot said. For every new patient who now enters treatment, almost three people become infected - for a widening gap between the available care and the needs of 33 million with HIV worldwide.

Piot challenged the crowd not to get embroiled in internecine scraps between treatment and prevention. Both are imperative, he said.

He rebutted arguments that countries should wait to attack AIDS until all their health systems are built. With help and good planning, the two efforts can be pursued in tandem, he said. (Indeed, Botswana with help from the Gates Foundation and Merck's free AIDS drug program, identified and filled gaps in its clinic infrastructure.)

If countries waited until their health systems were fixed before launching AIDS treatment programs, Piot said most of the 3 million people receiving AIDS antivirals "would be dead by now."

To critics who disparage AIDS programs as an entitlement program, he said, "This is an entitlement to life."

Piot exhorted delegates in the words of late reggae star Bob Marley, "Get up, stand up. Don't give up the fight."

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