World AIDS Day: A global plan to distribute life-saving anti-retroviral (ARV) drugs to millions of AIDS sufferers was launched yesterday amid warnings on World AIDS Day that the war against the disease was being lost.
World leaders called for urgent action to fight the scourge which affects 40 million people worldwide and devastated many of the poorest countries.
"We appear to be losing the fight against AIDS at the moment," said US Health Secretary Mr Tommy Thompson, marking World AIDS Day in Zambia, one of the worst-hit nations. "We need to redouble our efforts. This war has more casualties than any other war as we are losing three million people every year," he said.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu called for "lightning" action to fight AIDS as millions of people marked the day around the world with parades and prayers.
News came yesterday of a new $5.5 billion emergency strategy to supply badly needed drugs to fight the disease. At least six million people in developing countries need ARV treatment urgently to stay alive and healthy, but only between 300,000 and 400,000 are getting the costly drugs. The UN aims to get ARV treatment to half of the six million people by the end of 2005.
"Eight thousand people die every day and we recognise this as a moral imperative to act," said Dr Bjorn Melgaard, a senior World Health Organisation (WHO) official, in Bangkok.
Estimates released by UNAIDS last week showed deaths and new cases reached unprecedented levels in 2003 and were set to rise further as the epidemic maintains its deadly grip on sub-Saharan Africa and spreads across Eastern Europe and Asia. AIDS will have killed about three million people this year. Five million more will have been infected.
The Medecins Sans Frontieres medical charity said governments should provide AIDS drugs free under the new plan and pharmaceutical firms should cut prices further. "For the poorest no price will be affordable: governments of both developing and developed countries must meet these costs," its president, Mr Morten Rostrup, said.
Sub-Saharan Africa remains the worst affected region with about 3.2 million new infections and 2.3 million deaths in 2003.
Mr Ebrahim Samba, the WHO's Africa director, said he was confident modern drugs would defeat AIDS by turning a fatal disease into a manageable condition, but it would take time to change attitudes.
Archbishop Tutu told South Africa to move like "greased lightning" to treat people with HIV. "It is absolutely blasphemous, totally blasphemous to say that God is punishing us . . . it is the most awful use of religion."
In Muslim Somalia's breakaway enclave of Somaliland, religious affairs "minister" Sheikh Mohamed Sufi told a rally: "The best way to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS . . . is to stop committing adultery, and to live as God ordered us to do."
In the Asia-Pacific region one million people were infected this year, taking the total to more than seven million. Several countries, including China and India, face major epidemics unless effective action is taken, experts say.
In Cambodia, the worst AIDS-affected country in Asia, about 3,000 students, activists and dancers in white and red T-shirts paraded through Phnom Penh before piling into buses to spread the anti-AIDS message in the countryside.
But in Thailand government efforts to promote condom use suffered a setback last week when university students voted against condom-vending machines on campus, saying it would encourage casual sex and was the wrong way to fight AIDS.