Africa's $4.5 Billion AIDS Underspend

UNAIDS Executive Director Peter Piot said Monday that Africa needs $5 billion a year to fight AIDS -- 10 times the amount currently being spent to combat the disease. "In Africa it would require $5 billion to organize effective prevention, to care for people living with HIV and to support AIDS orphans," Piot told reporters at the 12th International Conference on AIDS and STDs in Africa in Ouagadougou, capital of Burkina Faso.

Piot said the AIDS-fighting money should come from national budgets of African nations, foreign donors, loans, and the $7 billion to $10 billion fund proposed by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan at the UN's special session on AIDS in June. Commitments to the fund, however, have fallen far short of the target.

More than 4,000 AIDS experts and health care workers are attending the conference, which has focused on the need to treat people with HIV as well as to prevent its transmission. On Sunday night, Piot told the opening session that only 30,000 of the 28 million HIV-infected Africans are receiving antiretroviral tritherapy. The move by some drug makers to cut AIDS medications' prices, Piot said, was "an important step, but it is insufficient and there is still a lot of work to do." He added, "The phase of planning and small pilot projects is over. I am telling the communities, young people and those living with HIV to stand up and be counted."

Stephen Lewis, Annan's special representative for AIDS in Africa, said the continent "is now mobilized to apply all the plans which have been drawn up, but this requires donor funds, and that money is not yet there."

"I would like to remind everybody that between 3,000 and 4,000 people died in the atrocious terrorist attack of Sept. 11, but double that number, between 6,000 and 8,000 people die [of AIDS] each day in Africa," Lewis said.

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