THAILAND/AIDS CONFERENCE: The largest-ever global AIDS conference opened in Bangkok last night with a sobering reminder that 8,000 adults and children die every day from the pandemic and that the global response is lagging far behind the needs, Denis McClean in Bangkok
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan won loud applause from over 15,000 delegates when he admitted that governments were not on track to reduce the size and scale of the epidemic by 2005, as promised three years ago at the first-ever UN General Assembly Special Session on HIV/AIDS.
"Meanwhile, over the past few years, we have seen a terrifying pattern emerge: all over the world, women are increasingly bearing the brunt of the epidemic.
"Women account for nearly half of all adult infections. In sub-Saharan Africa, that figure is around 58 per cent. Among people younger than 24, girls and young women make up nearly two-thirds of those living with HIV," he said.
Some 38 million people are infected with the HIV virus in the world today and over 20 million people have died. The biennial conference, which runs until Friday, has "Access for All" as its theme and Mr Annan called for more resources to support infrastructure in developing countries in order to scale up both treatment and prevention.
He blamed "poverty, abuse and violence, lack of information, coercion by older men, and men having several concurrent sexual relationships that entrap young women in a giant network of infection" as issues to be tackled if women and girls are to be empowered against the epidemic.
Mr Annan also called for leadership at every level to break "the deadly wall of silence that continues to surround the epidemic".
It was therefore one of the great ironies of the evening that Mr Annan, Thai government representatives and celebrities such as the actor Richard Gere, and Miss Universe, Jennifer Hawkins, had all left the building by the time the only listed speaker representing people living with AIDS got up to speak.
Few but his supporters were left to hear Mr Paisan Suwannawong, a former injecting drug user from the Thai AIDS Action Group, almost two hours into the opening ceremony. Many delegates appeared to believe that with the lighting of the traditional memorial candle to those who had died of AIDS, by the Thai Prime Minister, Mr Thaksin Shinawatra, the evening was coming to a close, particularly as the VIPs started to leave during a short film on youth and AIDS.
Mr Suwannawong delivered a searing indictment of the treatment of injecting drug users in Thailand and other parts of the world. He attacked the Thai government's recent war on drugs claiming that "over 2,500 people were killed extrajudicially in the first three months of the campaign" forcing many drug-users underground or into military-run rehabilitation centres.
He called for greater support for harm reduction interventions such as clean needles and the provision of methadone to injecting drug users who account for one in three of all new HIV infections outside Africa.
Calling President Bush "a criminal", he denounced the fact that "billions of dollars are freely available for the killing and destruction in Iraq, while the Global Fund is out of money".
A recurring theme of the opening day of the conference was the financial shortfall faced by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and malaria as it seeks to help raise $10 billion to fight the pandemic annually to meet the need for anti-retroviral therapy (ART) of an estimated six million people as well as prevention.
Funding was the focal point of a noisy but peaceful demonstration by AIDS activists on the road outside the conference centre during the afternoon. Both UNAIDS director, Dr Peter Piot, and Global Fund director, Dr Ricard Feachem, accepted the activists' invitation to address them from the back of a pick-up truck and to receive a petition to increase resources, and both credited the role of activists in bringing about an improved response to the AIDS pandemic.
Demonstrations at the last conference two years ago in Barcelona against the US Secretary for Health and Human Resources, Mr Tommy Thompson, are being partly blamed for the fact that the US administration has limited the number of representatives attending the conference, particularly from the renowned Atlanta-based Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.
Dr Joep Lange, president of the International AIDS Society, the conference convenors, described the absence of many American scientists as "tragic".