Without Fighting AIDS There Can Be No Sustainable Development, UNAIDS Chief Says

Efforts to uplift the world's poor will be meaningless without a massive international campaign to fight the AIDS pandemic ravaging Africa and other developing nations, UNAIDS head Dr. Peter Piot said Thursday at the World Summit for Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. "If AIDS is not brought under control, if people are not alive, if people are not healthy ... [development] won't happen," Piot said. The pandemic is reducing life expectancies, devastating families and destroying economies, according to a UNAIDS report released Thursday in an effort to emphasize how crucial the AIDS fight is to development.

AIDS, which disproportionately affects working-age adults, is killing millions of productive workers in some of the world's poorest countries. Business costs there are rising because of constant absenteeism and the cost to train workers to replace those who have died. Millions of children drop out of school after they are orphaned and forced to care for their families; another million children lost their teachers to AIDS last year. The disease is also exacerbating southern Africa's food crisis, since fewer people of working age are alive or healthy enough to tend to their fields.

In Zambia, HIV patients occupy nearly 50 percent of all hospital beds, said Zambian Health Minister Brian Chituwo. An estimated 21 percent of all adults are infected. "The [development] gains we have made in the last 30 years are severely affected," Chituwo said.

The Summit's 71-page implementation plan being debated contains five paragraphs on AIDS, calling for the protection of orphans and infected workers and asking nations to fulfill their commitments to the global fund. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan created the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, hoping it could raise $7 billion of the estimated $10 billion needed annually to tackle those diseases. But only $2 billion has been pledged so far -- mostly one-time gifts. "It's not rocket science, the problem is just money," said Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. "If every person in the rich world would spend just $10 a year for the global fund, we would have $10 billion."

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