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HIV/AIDS is a disaster of global proportions. New figures, released in advance of World AIDS Day on Dec. 1, show that more than 40 million people are now living with the virus. The vast majority of them are in sub-Saharan Africa, where the devastation is so acute that it has become one of the main obstacles to development, further impoverishing entire countries and limiting their ability to recover. But parts of the Caribbean and Asia are not far behind, and the pandemic is spreading at an alarming rate in eastern Europe, too.
For too long, global progress in facing up to AIDS was painfully slow, and nowhere near commensurate with the challenge. But in the past year, for much of the international community, the magnitude of the crisis has finally begun to sink in. Never, in the two long decades that the world has faced this growing catastrophe, has there been such a sense of common resolve and collective possibility.
Public opinion has been mobilized, by the media, NGOs and activists, by doctors and economists, and by people living with the disease. Pharmaceutical companies have made their AIDS drugs more affordable in poor countries, and a growing number of corporations have created programs to provide both prevention and treatment for employees and the wider community. Foundations are making increasingly imaginative and generous contributions, both financial and intellectual -- in prevention, in reducing mother-to-child transmission, in the search for a vaccine. In a growing number of countries, effective prevention campaigns have been launched, taking into account the local cultural context. There has been a growing recognition, among both donors and the most affected countries, of the inextricable link between prevention and treatment.
There has also been a new understanding of the particular toll that AIDS is taking on women -- and of the key role that women have in fighting the disease.
The entire United Nations family is fully engaged on the front lines of this fight, working to a common strategic plan and supporting country, regional and global efforts through our joint program, UNAIDS. Perhaps most important of all, a new awareness and commitment has taken hold among Governments -- most notably in Africa -- as more and more leaders are speaking out about AIDS in their own countries.
Last June, the membership of the United Nations met in a Special Session of the General Assembly to devise a comprehensive and coordinated global response to the AIDS crisis. They adopted a powerful declaration of commitments, calling for a fundamental shift in our response to HIV/ AIDS as a global economic, social and development challenge of the highest priority that must be addressed on all those fronts. They reaffirmed the pledge, made by world leaders in their Millennium Declaration, to halt, and begin to reverse the spread of AIDS, by 2015. And they set out a number of further ambitious but realistic time-bound targets and goals.
Among them were commitments to reach, by 2005, an overall target of annual expenditure on AIDS of $7 billion to $10 billion each year in low and middle-income countries; to ensure, by 2005, that a wide range of prevention programs are available in all countries; and to support the establishment, on an urgent basis, of a fund to help finance an urgent and expanded response to the epidemic.
Only seven months after I proposed this new international facility to support the global fight against AIDS and other infectious diseases, pledges to the fund stand at more than $1.5 billion. The fund cannot be the only channel of resources for a full-scale global response to AIDS. But what is most heartening is the range of pledges that have been made: from the world's wealthiest nations -- starting with the founding contribution from the United States last May -- but also from some of its poorest; as well as from foundations, corporations and private individuals.
At the end of this eventful year, it is clear that we have the roadmap, the tools and the knowledge to fight AIDS. What we must sustain now is the political will. If anything, our task is more, not less, urgent than before.
Life after Sept. 11 has made us all think more deeply about the kind of world we want for our children. It is the same world we wanted on Sept. 10 -- a world in which a child does not die of AIDS every minute. That is why we must not compound one tragedy with another.
Kofi Annan is secretary-general of the United Nations. He contributed this comment to The Moscow Times.
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