U.N. to hold high-level meeting on AIDS
The United Nations hopes that a high-level meeting on AIDS starting Wednesday will bring a surge of new funding to fight the disease, after a report warned that the epidemic continues to spread and $20 billion will be needed each year to fight it by 2008.
Yet HIV/AIDS activists and civil society groups arriving at the United Nations for the three-day event warned that countries appear reluctant to set new targets to fight the disease and will shy away from making any major promises.
The meeting is one of the biggest of its kind since a conference was held in 2001. U.N. officials expect more than 10 heads of state, 100 cabinet ministers and 1,000 civil society representatives to attend.
It is meant to review progress toward fighting AIDS in the five years since U.N. member states, in a document in the General Assembly, set forth an ambitious agenda with a series of targets to slow the spread of AIDS. It comes a week prior to the 25th anniversary of the first documented AIDS cases on June 5, 1981.
On Tuesday, the U.N. AIDS office released a 630-page report that said the rate of new infections appears to be slowing but that the international community was far from getting the virus under control.
"We are making progress, but unfortunately I cannot tell you that we are on the way to reversing this epidemic," UNAIDS head Dr. Peter Piot told reporters. "The truth is we are still running behind."
The report said that nearly 40 million people are living with HIV/AIDS. India now has the largest number of AIDS infections, but the epidemic still remains at its worst in sub-Saharan Africa, where per capita rates continue to climb in several countries.
A third of adults were infected in Swaziland in 2005. By comparison, India's per capita rate is low, at 0.9 percent of its 1.02 billion people.
Women's vulnerability to the disease continues to increase, with more than 17 million women infected worldwide — nearly half the global total — and more than three-quarters of them living in sub-Saharan Africa, the report found.
Piot said he hoped the conference would result in new commitments for longer-term aid, not just year-by-year contributions.
"Today we need to move to the next stage, and what I hope will come out of the high-level meeting now is one new commitment for long-term funding," Piot said. "We know that as of 2008 approximately $20 billion a year are needed."
Thoraya Obaid, executive director of the U.N. Fund for Population Activities, said there were positive results in nations where condoms were properly distributed and women were empowered.
"Prevention remains our first and most effective line of defense," Obaid said.
With the report in hand, delegates from around the world have been negotiating the document that will be approved on the last day of the event. It will essentially chart a course of action over the next several years for government action in things like prevention, treatment and women's rights.
Part of this will include reviewing the document agreed to in 2001. Aside from reaching the funding goal with $8.3 billion now set aside, few of its many targets have been met.
The money needed to fight AIDS has gone up, and officials say there is now a funding gap of between $18-20 billion each year. Yet civil society groups said they already saw some resistance from nations to mentioning that figure.
"The main problem that we're facing is that governments recognize that they haven't delivered on the 2001 commitments and don't want to make any new commitments," said Kieran Daly, a spokesman for the International Council of AIDS Service Organizations, based in Toronto.
Civil society groups also warned that some conservative nations, backed by the Catholic Church, could try to strip out language that says effective prevention requires greater availability of condoms, microbicides and vaccines.
Tests: Bird flu killed Indonesian teen
Bird flu killed a 15-year-old boy in Indonesia, a health official said Wednesday citing local tests, as the country struggled to get a grip on a recent spike in cases.
The latest victim was rushed to a hospital in the city of Bandung on Monday and died a day later, said Hariyadi Wibisono, director of communicable disease control at the Ministry of Health.
Local tests came back positive for the H5N1 bird flu virus, but still need to be confirmed by a World Health Organization laboratory in Hong Kong, he said.
The boy, from the West Java town of Tasikmalaya, had a history of contact with poultry, he said.
He is the third recent victim from the province. Last week, a 10-year-old girl and her 18-year-old brother who lived in another village died of the disease. Sick and dead birds were reported near their home.
Bird flu has killed 127 people worldwide since the virus began ravaging Asian poultry stocks in late 2003. Nearly a quarter of the human deaths have been in Indonesia, which has an official tally of 36, including at least a dozen in May alone.
In North Sumatra, six of seven relatives from the tiny farming village of Kubu Simbelang died after being infected with the virus. An eighth family member was buried before samples were collected, but WHO considers her part of the cluster — the largest ever reported.
Experts have not been able to link contact between the relatives and infected birds, which has led them to suspect limited human-to-human transmission may have occurred. However, no one outside the family of blood relatives — no spouses — has fallen ill and experts have said the virus has not mutated in any way.
Scientists believe human-to-human transmission has occurred in a handful of other smaller family clusters, all involving blood relatives. Experts theorize that may mean some people have a genetic susceptibility to the disease, but there is no evidence to support that.
The lone survivor of the Sumatra family cluster is recovering in a hospital in Medan.
The disease remains hard for people to catch and most human cases so far have been traced to contact with infected birds. But experts fear the virus will mutate into a highly contagious form that passes easily among people, possible sparking a pandemic.
They stress, however, that has not happened in Kubu Simbelang.
Scientists in Rome to discuss bird flu
Three years after the first outbreaks of bird flu in Asia, experts are still puzzling at how the disease spread across three continents so quickly and how wild birds have helped disseminate the deadly virus.
More than 300 scientists and animal experts discussed these and other questions at a two-day conference which opened in Rome on Tuesday.
The meeting was organized by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, based in Rome, and by the Paris-based World Organization for Aniabdo
Experts were invited from about 100 countries.
The H5N1 strain of bird flu has killed at least 127 people worldwide and ravaged poultry flocks in Asia, Europe and Africa, but experts are still unsure if migrating birds or the commercial poultry trade deserve most of the blame for spreading the disease.
Also experts wonder why the virus, widespread in South East Asia since 2003, only started moving across the continent to Europe and Africa last year, said Samuel Jutzi, director of FAO's animal production and health division.
"Why all of a sudden that happened is not entirely clear," Jutzi told The Associated Press on the eve of the conference. "And if the wild birds had a role in that, why didn't they have one before?"
So far, most human cases have been traced to contact with infected poultry, but experts fear the deadly virus could mutate into a form that passes easily from human to human, possibly sparking a global pandemic. Understanding how the bird flu virus spreads is a key factor in the fight against the disease.
Evidence on the role of wild birds is not always conclusive in the areas where H5N1 has appeared. Migratory birds introduced the disease in Russia and Eastern Europe, but in the case of recent outbreaks in Africa no evidence has yet been found pointing to wild birds, Jutzi said.
"Ornithologists are very knowledgeable on the movement of the birds but not on their diseases," he said. "We hope the conference will indicate some research in this direction."
So far, research shows that wild birds are likely to introduce the virus in unaffected areas but that the disease becomes widespread mostly through poor hygiene and through poultry trade, Jutzi said.
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