THAILAND: The 15th International AIDS Conference closed yesterday in Bangkok on an optimistic note from UNAIDS executive direc- tor, Dr Peter Piot, who said: "I truly believe that, for the first time there is a real chance that we will get ahead of the epidemic."
He attributed this momentum to science and activism noting "this last decade has seen an unprecedented combination of the two. Our challenge remains: how to raise action on both fronts to the level we need to achieve a world free of AIDS."
Dr Piot ring-fenced his optimism with a demanding set of conditions which included an end to rival co-ordination mechanisms as "fragmentation has real costs, in money and in lives".
Capacity needed to be built so treatment and care can be delivered for the next 20 years and he warned that "without a greatly expanded prevention effort, treatment is simply not sustainable. Of course we need condoms and clean needles but we need to go way beyond them."
He called for crisis management to be combined with long-term investment and appealed "to all donor nations to contribute their share, including to the Global Fund - and to all developing nations to give priority to AIDS in their budget allocations."
Sustaining the billions needed will require results, support from mainstream public opinion in rich countries and recognition of the need to maintain special AIDS funding for many years.
Dr Piot also called for Africa's crippling debt to be relieved - "the $15 billion annually that disappears down the money pit. That is four times more than is spent on health and education - the building blocks of the AIDS response."
He said there was a need to accept "the exceptionalism of AIDS" which claims the lives of 8,000 adults and children every day.
Dr Piot called on "every community to rewrite the rules of how it deals with those sensitive issues at the heart of the epidemic - sex, homosexuality, commercial sex, drug use, rape, stigma, gender, masculinity".
Mrs Sonia Gandhi said she was aware that India figured prominently in "doomsday scenarios" of the spread of HIV/AIDS but she said the Indian government was committed to strengthening its response.
WHO director general, Dr Jong-Wook Lee, said the organisation was firmly committed to providing pre-qualification for safe, effective and affordable drugs and scaling up access to testing and counselling services.