UN agencies urge European ministers to take immediate action on AIDS

The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), the World Health Organization (WHO) and the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) today urged European ministers attending an AIDS conference to take immediate action to halt the spread of the disease across the continent and to treat those in need.

HIV/AIDS is spreading rapidly across Eastern Europe and HIV infections are on the rise again in Western Europe, partly because governments are not focusing as much on prevention as they once did, according to the three UN agencies.

The agencies are participating in a two-day conference of European ministers, starting today in Dublin, Ireland, that is looking at ways for countries and organizations to work more effectively together in the battle against HIV/AIDS in Europe and Central Asia.

There are now more than 1.5 million people living with HIV/AIDS in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, compared to 30,000 in 1995 - making it the site of the fastest-growing HIV epidemic in the world. Many sufferers are young or engage in unsafe sex, increasing the risk of infection.

UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy said young people must be at the heart of new regional AIDS prevention campaigns given their disproportionately high infection rates. "The evidence shows that when serious and sustained prevention efforts target young people, HIV prevalence rates decline as they did among young people in Cambodia, Uganda and Brazil," she said.

UNAIDS Executive Director Peter Piot said, "European ministers must urgently scale up and roll out effective HIV prevention and treatment programmes" if they want to prevent the disease from crippling its social and economic development.

WHO Director-General Lee Jong-Wook said his agency and UNAIDS have launched an ambitious scheme to give anti-retroviral treatment to 3 million people in developing and emerging economies by 2005. "Treatment should be a right for all, including for sex workers and injecting drug users," Dr. Lee said.

In a video message to the conference, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan noted that the disease is spreading faster in Eastern Europe and Central Asia than any other part of the world. Calling it "the most globalized epidemic humanity has ever known," he said, "we must constantly adapt our strategies to new conditions, and work with new partners."