The world's biggest AIDS conference will close today with calls from former US President Bill Clinton and other world figures to mobilize resources for millions of sufferers in the developing world.
Two decades into an epidemic that kills one person every 10 seconds, the gulf between rich and poor is starker than ever.
The sophisticated drugs that have turned HIV infection into a manageable condition in the West reach only one in a thousand in Africa, the epicenter of the crisis.
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Mr Clinton, who is the co-chairman of the International AIDS Trust, described AIDS as the biggest single problem for the world, barring nuclear war, and called on Western governments to pay up for a new global AIDS fund.
"First of all, the rich countries should figure out what they owe and pay in a timely fashion," he said.
"For the first time in history the world has to take responsibility for a global health crisis."
The US and other Western governments have borne the brunt of protests at the biennial meeting, with activists noisily demanding they commit $10 billion a year to the UN's Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
Created in 2001, it has so far secured just $2.8 billion. Without that money, the World Health Organization's target of getting anti-retroviral drugs to three million people by 2005 will remain a pipe dream.
A debate has raged throughout the conference over the balance between prevention and treatment in the developing world, home to 95 per cent of the world's 40 million infections.
Despite steep price cuts for poor countries and competition from generic drugs, combination therapy remains out of reach for the vast majority of those in the developing world.
By contrast, the meeting offered new hope to people with HIV in the industrialized world, who will soon have access to a new class of anti-AIDS drugs that appears to fight resistant strains of virus. It will be the most expensive yet.
A vaccine, however, is still far from assured. Mr Seth Berkley, president of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, said the meeting had been "a reality check" on how the world was doing in the fight against AIDS.
