SOUTH AFICA: The United Nations is to unveil plans today to rush life-saving anti-retroviral AIDS drugs to three million of the world's poor in a $5.5 billion emergency strategy to fight a disease which is now killing 8,000 people a day.
"The lives of millions of people are at stake," said WHO (World Health Organisation) director-general Mr Lee Jong-wook in a statement to mark World Aids Day. "This strategy demands massive and unconventional efforts to make sure they stay alive.
"Preventing and treating AIDS may be the toughest health assignment the world has faced, but it is also the most urgent."
WHO said last week that 40 million people around the world were infected with HIV, and that the global AIDS epidemic shows no signs of abating.
The UN organisation estimates that six million people in poor countries are in immediate need of the anti-retroviral (ARV) treatment which many rich world sufferers now take for granted, but fewer 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 policy-makers 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.
"The aim is to ensure that all people living with AIDS, even in the poorest settings, have access to treatment through this simplified approach," a WHO statement said.
The UN Secretary-General, Mr Kofi Annan, thinks many political leaders still simply do not care enough to fight the disease, which has killed 28 million people since it was first reported in the United States in 1981.
Experts said a pillar of the plan would be a vast increase in the manufacture and distribution of combination therapy ARVs under which sufferers need only take two pills a day.
It is a simpler treatment regime than standard rich world programmes which require eight or more pills a day, and means compliance by patients in poor countries should be good.
The distribution of combination therapy has implications for the pharmaceutical business: multinational firms have often been prevented by patent restrictions from producing combination pills, a worry not shared by generic drugs manufacturers. - (Reuters)