There?s more money to spend on AIDS, drugs are cheaper but the disease is spreading far faster than global efforts to stop it.

?The situation today is that the pandemic is galloping out of control,? said Richard Feachem, head of the independent Global Fund, created by the United Nations and industrialized countries to combat AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.

To raise more money and keep programs on track, the UN General Assembly yesterday holds a one-day session on the pandemic, with 136 speakers and panel discussions.

Africa is well represented, with a number of presidents. Also addressing the forum is French President Jacques Chirac, prime mover of getting Europeans to contribute to the Global Fund. And US Secretary of State, Colin Powell speaks for the United States, the largest contributor.

Worrying situation in India

Entire communities are wrecked and 14 million children have lost at least one parent, UN figures show.

In southern Africa, more than a quarter of the population is infected with the disease. And the epicenter is shifting to Asia, China and Russia, experts say.

?The epidemic in India is going to be huge and there is nothing in place to prevent that from happening,? Feachem said in an interview. The world began paying more attention to the disease in the mid-1990s. UNAIDS, a coordinating body was set up to circumvent the World Health Organization, whose then-leadership had stifled its own AIDS programs.

Full-blown symptoms

But substantial funds were committed only after a major UN conference on AIDS two years ago and the creation of the Global Fund. But coordination between the various programs and agencies, most based in Geneva, is still a problem.

WHO Director-General, Dr Lee Jong-Wook now is pushing a ?3 by 5? plan to provide drugs to 3 million people living with AIDS in developing countries by the end of 2005.

About 42 million people are suffering from HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, and 6 million have full-blown symptoms. But for many, the programs are too little and too late unless a bigger effort is made immediately.

In a country like Botswana where the pandemic touches nearly 38 per cent of the population, a three-year massive infusion of cash is taking time to have an impact.

?They waited so long. They actually came in when there was already more than a 30 per cent infection rate,? said Dr Michel Lavollay, a French AIDS expert, now with the International Labor Organization.

The Global Fund has disbursed $1.4 billion for 150 programs in 93 countries over the past two years. Some $4.7 billion is pledged over the next five years, still considerably short of the $7 billion Secretary-General, Kofi Annan said was needed annually to reverse the pandemic.

President George W. Bush has proposed spending $15 billion on AIDS over the next five years. Congress has authorized up to $1 billion a year for the Global Fund, as long as its contribution does not exceed one third of the total, a reflection of uneasiness with multinational projects.

?We are now poised for the massive counterattack in the war we are losing for two decades. The challenge in next two years is to get large-scale programs in place,? Feachem said.

He noted that the price of drugs has dropped from a $15,000 annual rate a patient to some $300 to $600 a day. People now can take 3 pills a day compared to 25 pills a few years ago.

But Canadian Stephen Lewis, the UN envoy for AIDS in Africa, was angry and less diplomatic.

At an AIDS conference in Nairobi on Sunday, he castigated the United States and others for spending $200 billion on terrorism and the Iraq war, calling it ?the grotesque obscenity of the modern world.?

Evelyn Leopold

financial support

UNAIDS warns of $3 billion funding shortfall in Africa

The United Nations AIDS group warned of a massive $3 billion shortfall in funding to fight the disease in sub-Saharan Africa where almost 30 million people are living with HIV/AIDS. ?Even with recent increases in AIDS spending, the mismatch between need and funding continues to be one of the biggest obstacles in the struggle to control the epidemic,? UNAIDS said in a report.

Without the cash countries in sub-Saharan Africa ? where 10 million young people (aged 15-24) and almost 3 million children under 15 live with HIV -- will be unable to effectively implement or expand prevention and treatment programmes, it said.

The report said only half of the $6 billion needed to fight HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa by 2005 was likely to be raised. UNAIDS officials said they had included in their projections US President George W. Bush?s five-year, $15 billion plan to combat AIDS in African and Caribbean countries as well as other donor pledges.

The report said without an expanded programme of prevention and treatment, the AIDS death toll was expected to continue rising before peaking at around the end of this decade.

It said limited access to anti-retroviral treatment was one of the factors hampering Africa?s fight against HIV/AIDS. Only 50,000 people were receiving the treatment at the end of 2002, it said -- about one per cent of those who need it.

?The stakes could not be higher. The effects of AIDS in Africa are eroding decades of development efforts,? the organisation said in its report. ?In high prevalence countries, families are unravelling, economies are slowing down, and social services deteriorating,? the report said. HIV has a 6.8 per cent prevalence rate in sub-Saharan Africa, although it varies between 39 per cent in Botswana to under one per cent in Senegal.

UNAIDS also called on governments to reduce the vulnerability of women and girls who account for almost 60 per cent of infected people in sub-Saharan Africa.

The report, Accelerating Action Against AIDS in Africa, was released on the opening day of the Kenya-hosted 13th International Conference on AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Infections in Africa.

FACTBOX

AIDS deaths rise despite calls for treatment

Following are the latest statistics, trends, issued by UNAIDS, the World Health Organization, and other UN bodies.

• 28 million people have died from AIDS to date out of the 65 million who have contracted the disease over 20 years.

• 42 million people are infected by the HIV virus that causes AIDS. Of this group 6 million have full-blown symptoms. In 2002, 3.1 million died and 5 million were infected.

• 28.5 million people in sub-Saharan Africa are infected with HIV/AIDS out of an adult population of 291 million and 15 million have died. In Botswana, the rate is nearly 39 percent.

• 6 million people in developing nations need AIDS treatment immediately. Less than 300,000 get it. In Africa just 50,000 people out of 4.1 million have access to treatment.

• At current rates of delivery, less than 1 million people of the 6 million who need desperately drugs in the developing world will have access to proper drugs by the end of 2005. The World Health Organization advocates a "3 by 5" goal to provide drugs to 3 million people by the end of 2005.

• The annual cost of drugs costs $300 to $600 per person in developing nations.

More than 14 million children under the age of 15 have lost one or both parents to AIDS. This number is expected to increase to 24 million by 2010.

• The AIDS pandemic is expected to increase until mid-century after spreading to China, Russia, India and other parts of Asia unless responses are accelerated.

• Total global spending for AIDS from all sources is about $4 billion in 2003.