Former United States president Bill Clinton was to take centre stage at the International Aids Conference in Mexico on Monday, where he was expected to demand that all the world’s poor gain access to lifesaving anti-HIV drugs.
A showstopper at the past two biennial global Aids parlays, Clinton has championed price cuts for antiretroviral therapy that now keeps three million poor, badly infected people alive.
Clinton and United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon head the roster of VIPs at the six-day conference, which opened on Sunday to calls for donor countries to wrench open the spigot of funding to combat the disease.
The UN General Assembly and the Group of Eight (G8) have set the goal of achieving universal access to treatment and therapy by 2010.
Despite a big scale-up in the past two years, less than one-third of all people in developing countries who need the drugs have been able to grasp the lifeline.
”As the fight against Aids nears the end of its third decade, we are still facing a huge shortfall in resources,” Ban warned at the opening ceremony.
”The responses to HIV and Aids require long-term and sustained financing. As more people go on treatment and live longer, budgets will have to increase considerably over the next few decades. In the most affected countries, donors will have to provide the majority of the funding,” he said,
More than 25-million people have died from Aids since the disease first emerged in 1981, and 33-million people today are living with HIV, two-thirds of them in sub-Saharan Africa.
Margaret Chan, director general of the UN’s World Health Organisation (WHO), warned that the war on Aids will be protracted. ”We dare not let down our guard. This is an unforgiving epidemic,” she warned. ”We are going to be in this for the long haul.”
”The end of AIDS is nowhere in sight,” said Peter Piot, executive director of the UN Joint Programme on HIV/Aids (UNAids). ”Every day, almost three times as many people become newly infected with HIV as those who start taking antiretroviral therapy.”
Large conference
The 17th International Aids Conference is the first to take place in Latin America, a region with entrenched stigma against people with HIV.
More than 22 000 scientists, policymakers and field workers are attending, making it the second-largest conference in the history of the disease, and the largest in a developing country.
Funding, access to treatment, beefing up prevention of HIV and an array of social evils from stigma to violence against women are the headline issues.
On the pharmacological front, delegates do not expect any breakthrough announcement in the arena of new drugs, and the news is likely to be grim about the frustrating search for a preventative vaccine and an HIV-thwarting vaginal gel.
According to UNAids, about $10-billion was spent last year fighting Aids in poor countries, a massive rise compared with the start of the decade but still more than $8-billion short of what was needed.
Just to maintain the current pace of drug scale-up means that funding will have to rise by 50% by 2010, but this will still be far short of the target of universal access, UNAids said in updated report last week.
The former UN special envoy for Aids in Africa, Stephen Lewis, said he feared that UNAids and the G8 were trying to tiptoe away from the 2010 goal.
In the G8 summit final statement and in the UNAids report, the language pointed to a drift towards postponing universal access to 2015, the year targeted in a UN Millennium Development Goal for halting and reversing the spread of HIV/Aids, Lewis said.
”They talk about universal access without mentioning a date,” Lewis said at a dinner with reporters on Saturday. ”[ … ] I think money has a lot to do with it.” — Sapa-AFP