AIDS pandemic racing faster than means to stop it

Money available to fight AIDS has soared to an all-time high of $8 billion but the pandemic is racing faster than the means to stop it, especially among women and girls, says a report prepared for a high-level U.N. forum on Thursday.

“AIDS unleashes a chain of events that threatens to cause entire societies to unravel,” U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in the report. “In short, AIDS is an exceptional problem which demands an exceptional response.”More than 120 delegates are scheduled to address the all-day meeting, many of them ministers or their deputies, to assess progress since a 2001 special U.N. General Assembly session on HIV/AIDS.Programs have succeeded in Brazil, which has the most successful AIDS program among developing nations. Cambodia and Thailand have shown substantial progress and several African nations as well as the Bahamas have slowed the rate of infection, says the report Annan submitted to delegates.But only 12 percent of those who need treatment are receiving it. Effective prevention programs, counseling and testing services are the exception to the rule and drugs still cost too much, the report said.And despite the many programs and money spent, the epidemic has not been reversed. The 4.9 million infections and 3.1 million AIDS deaths in 2004 were the highest to date, Annan said.Some of the worst predictions have come to pass. Nearly half of the estimated 39.4 million people living with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, are women and girls, whether married or single, promiscuous or faithful.WOMEN NEED INFORMATION”The trend is that more young women are being infected than young men,” Thoraya Obeid, the head of the U.N. Population Fund, told a news conference on Wednesday.”If they are married, they can’t abstain. They are faithful but the husband is not faithful,” Obeid said.Women, she said, need information, including how to use a female condom to protect themselves.Men and women between 15 and 24 years old are the hardest hit by the pandemic. Obeid released a survey done by young people in a dozen countries, most of whom said they had no voice in their nation’s AIDS policies.Others said programs needed to be comprehensive — abstinence and sex education, young people talking to other adolescents as well as to intravenous drug users.The world’s largest donor for fighting AIDS is the United States, which spent $2.4 billion last year. But it is being pressured by conservative religious groups toward abstinence-only programs and away from vulnerable groups like prostitutes, homosexuals and drug addicts.Included in the U.S. contribution is some $450 million, or a third of the budget of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria — a powerful independent organization of governments, business and private groups, first proposed by Annan four years ago.The new head of the group’s policy and strategy committee is Randall Tobias, who runs the Bush administration’s AIDS program. Some officials are worried that the fund will adopt U.S. positions, but others say such fears are groundless.Worldwide, the U.N. report says, some $8 billion will be available in 2005 to implement programs in 135 low- and middle-income countries, a dramatic 23 percent increase over the previous year. Of this amount, rich countries have contributed some $6.7 billion, six times greater than the world spent in 2001.(Source: Reuters, June 2005)