UN plan to rush AIDS therapy to world's poor

The United Nations will today unveil plans 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 now killing 8,000 a day.

"The lives of millions of people are at stake. This strategy demands massive and unconventional efforts to make sure they stay alive," World Health Organisation Director-General Lee Jong-wook said in a statement to mark World Aids Day.

"Preventing and treating AIDS may be the toughest health assignment the world has faced, but it is also the most urgent."

The world body announced last week that 40 million people around the world are infected with HIV, and that the global AIDS epidemic shows no signs of abating.

The UN's WHO estimates that six million people in poor countries are in immediate need of the anti-retroviral (ARV) treatment that many rich world sufferers now take for granted, but less 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.

UN Secretary-General 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 among homosexual men in the United States in 1981.