The United Nations has unveiled plans to rush life-saving anti-retroviral AIDS drugs to three million of the world's poor in a $5.5 billion emergency plan to fight a disease now killing 8,000 people a day.
"The lives of millions of people are at stake. This strategy demands massive and unconventional efforts to make sure they stay alive," World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Lee Jong-wook said in a statement to mark World Aids Day.
"Preventing and treating AIDS may be the toughest health assignment the world has faced, but it is also the most urgent."
Experts said a pillar of the plan will be a vast increase in the manufacture and distribution of combination therapy ARVs under which sufferers need only take two pills a day.
The world body announced last week that 40 million people around the world are infected with HIV, and that the global AIDS epidemic shows no signs of abating.
The WHO estimates that six million people in poor countries are in immediate need of the anti-retroviral (ARV) treatment that many rich world sufferers now take for granted, but less than 300,000 actually receive it. The strategy requires getting ARV treatment to half of the six million by the end of 2005.
The WHO, whose recommendations guide policymakers around the world, is expected at the global launch of the strategy in Kenya to provide details of how to widen access to "combination therapy", which improves the effectiveness of treatment.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan thinks many political leaders do not care enough to fight the disease, which has killed 28 million people since it was first reported among homosexual men in the United States in 1981.