Annan urges world leaders to take the responsibility for stopping HIV/AIDS

Secretary-General Kofi Annan, addressing national leaders at a special United Nations meeting to assess progress since 2001 on turning back HIV/AIDS, today called on all heads of State and government to take personal responsibility for stopping the spread of the disease.

Turning the tide against this epidemic “requires every President and Prime Minister, every parliamentarian and politician, to decide and declare that ‘AIDS stops with me,’” he told the plenary at the High-Level segment of the three-day General Assembly meeting on AIDS.

“It requires all of you to make the fight against AIDS your personal priority – not only this session, or this year, or next year – but every year until the epidemic is reversed. I look to every one of you to demonstrate this personal commitment in the declaration that you adopt today.”

Among the action needed was giving more power and confidence to women and girls, transforming relations between women and men at all levels of society, and providing greater resources for women, better laws for women, and more seats for women at the decision-making table, Mr. Annan said.

Without radical change, “we will get nowhere close to universal access to HIV prevention, treatment, care and support by 2010 – the goal that you committed yourselves to at the World Summit last September. If we don't step up the fight drastically, we will not reach the Millennium Development Goal of halting, and beginning to reverse, the spread of HIV and AIDS by 2015,” he said.

He noted that in 25 years, AIDS had changed the world, killing 25 million people, becoming the leading cause of death among people between the ages of 15 and 59 and inflicting the single greatest reversal in the history of human development.

“In other words, it has become the greatest challenge of our generation,” Mr. Annan said.

The world has come to recognize the challenge, but, despite some progress on access to treatment and a lower rate of infection among young people in some countries, the epidemic continued to outpace the efforts, he said.

Last year there were more new infections worldwide than ever before, more people died than ever before and there were more women and girls living with HIV/AIDS than ever before, he said.

Mr. Annan expressed the hope that since so many governments were represented at the highest levels at the meeting, their presence signalled their real commitment to the fight against the HIV/AIDS pandemic.