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Call for collective action and strong leadership,
to turn back HIV/AIDS epidemic
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| Aids orphans
in Thailand (here with abbot) get an education at Buddhist
monastery, Chiang Mai province. (Photo courtesy of Arjen van
de Merwe/World Population Foundation). |
Despite years of significant progress, the global battle against
the AIDS epidemic is still losing ground, United Nations Secretary-General
Kofi Annan told high-level officials meeting in New York in early
June to review progress made towards combating the deadly disease.
Saying that progress had been “significant but insufficient”,
the Secretary-General warned that the epidemic was accelerating
on every continent and called for more money and leadership to halt
its spread, as he opened the General Assembly’s high-level
review of efforts to achieve the goals adopted by the 2001 special
session on HIV/AIDS.
That historic meeting had called for the rapid expansion of HIV
prevention, care, treatment and impact alleviation by the year 2005.
“The response has succeeded in some of the particulars, but
it has not matched the epidemic in scale”, Mr. Annan said,
adding that only 12 per cent of those in need of antiretroviral
therapies in low and middle-income countries are receiving them.
In addition to examining successes and failures in the battle against
HIV/AIDS, the Assembly meeting outlined solutions to policy shortcomings.
Mr. Annan told the Assembly that prevention programmes were actually
succeeding in Brazil, Cambodia and Thailand, and were making progress
in the Bahamas, Cameroon, Kenya, Zambia and elsewhere.
“We must replicate and build on these successes”, he
said. Doing so, he added, would require increased resources, better
planning, more vocal leadership and real investment in the empowerment
of women and girls.
(Source: United Nations News Service, 3 June)
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