New drug plan launched

A global plan to rush life-saving anti-retroviral (ARV) drugs to millions of Aids sufferers was launched yesterday amid warnings on World Aids Day that the war against the disease was being lost.

As world leaders called for urgent action to fight the scourge which has devastated many of the poorest countries in the world, the Vatican defended its controversial position against advocating condoms as protection against HIV.

"We appear to be losing the fight against Aids at the moment," said US Health Secretary Tommy Thompson, marking World Aids Day in Zambia, one of the worst-hit nations.

"We need to redouble our efforts. This war has more casualties than any other war as we are losing three million people every year," Mr Thompson said.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu called for "lightning" action to fight Aids as millions of people marked World Aids Day around the world with parades and prayers.

While China aired its first officially backed TV ad for condoms, the Vatican said fidelity, chastity and abstinence were the best ways to fight HIV/Aids in a "pan-sexualist society".

In a clear reference to condoms, Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan said information campaigns should not be "based on policies that foster immoral and hedonistic lifestyles and behaviour, favouring the spread of the evil."

World Aids Day came amid news of a new $5.5 billion emergency strategy to supply badly needed drugs to fight a disease now infecting 40 million people around the world.

At least six million people living with HIV-Aids in developing countries need ARV treatment urgently to stay alive and healthy, but only between 300,000 and 400,000 are getting the costly drugs. The UN plan aims to get ARV treatment to half the six million people by the end of 2005.

"Eight thousand people die every day and we recognise this as a moral imperative to act," Dr Bjorn Melgaard, a senior World Health Organisation official, told reporters in Bangkok.

Estimates released by UNAids last week showed deaths and new cases reached unprecedented levels in 2003 and were set to rise further as the epidemic maintains its deadly grip on sub-Saharan Africa and spreads across Eastern Europe and Asia.

Aids will have killed about three million people this year. Five million more will have been infected.

The Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) medical charity said governments should provide Aids drugs free under the new plan and pharmaceutical firms should cut prices further.

"For the poorest no price will be affordable: governments of both developing and developed countries must meet these costs," MSF President Morten Rostrup said in a statement.

Sub-Saharan Africa remains the worst affected region with about 3.2 million new infections and 2.3 million deaths in 2003.

Ebrahim Samba, Who's Africa director, told Reuters he was confident modern drugs would defeat Africa's stubborn Aids stigma by turning a fatal disease into a manageable condition, but it would take time to change attitudes.

"Working in Africa, you have to be pathologically optimistic. A pessimist doesn't survive here," he said.

Archbishop Tutu told South Africa to move like "greased lightning" to treat people with HIV. "It is absolutely blasphemous, totally blasphemous to say that God is punishing us... it is the most awful use of religion," he said.

In Muslim Somalia's breakaway enclave of Somaliland, religious affairs "minister" Sheikh Mohamed Sufi told a rally: "The best way to stop the spread of HIV/Aids... is to stop committing adultery, and to live as God ordered us to do."