UN envoy says southern Africa nations are determined to win the battle on AIDS

Countries across southern Africa are showing they have the determination necessary to win the battle against the HIV/AIDS pandemic but many started too late and hurdles remain, the Secretary-General's Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa said today.

Briefing reporters at UN Headquarters in New York after a visit to Uganda and Lesotho, Stephen Lewis said he was heartened that many nations in the region where AIDS has taken the greatest toll were now making every effort to defeat the scourge.

"Every government [in the region] is engaged in this. Some of them are slow to embrace treatment rationale, as in South Africa; some of them are overwhelmed by putting everything in place, as seems to be the case in Tanzania," he said.

"But there is an almost universal, Pavlovian reflex - for example, in Botswana, Rwanda, Zambia, Malawi, Kenya and Namibia - to demolish the obstacles and get pervasive treatment underway."

However, Mr. Lewis said, "what is happening now should have happened and could have happened several years ago," and he said funding in global anti-AIDS initiatives still lagged behind what was required.

The Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria needs more money, he said, to pay for the so-called "3 by 5 initiative," which calls for 3 million HIV/AIDS sufferers in developing countries to receive anti-retroviral therapy by the end of 2005.

Referring to his recent visit to Africa, Mr. Lewis highlighted Lesotho, where 30 per cent of its citizens are estimated to be HIV-positive - the most of any least developed country in the world - for its "remarkably talented and gifted Cabinet," which he said had brought "all the apparatus of response" together to combat AIDS.

In Uganda, where there is a prevalence rate of about 4 per cent, Mr. Lewis praised the Government and anti-AIDS organizations for "a single-minded determination to carry it off."

But the envoy said both countries still face enormous practical hurdles to beating back HIV/AIDS, which killed 2.2 million people in sub-Saharan Africa last year.

Mr. Lewis said Lesotho has a notorious industrial complex where as many as 54,000 female garment workers toil in "sweatshop" conditions for little pay, forcing them to seek what is called "transactional sex" to supplement their incomes and increasing the chance that sexual diseases such as AIDS will be transferred.

In northern Uganda, the brutal conflict waged by the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) against the Government has included the abduction of thousands of children as soldiers or sexual slaves for the rebel group's commanders.

As much as 90 per cent of the population in northern Uganda is displaced from their homes, Mr. Lewis said, adding it has also led to the phenomenon of "night commuters," where up to 40,000 children walk several kilometres every evening to makeshift shelters to avoid LRA attacks.