Nations resist new financial commitments on AIDS

By Staff
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UNITED NATIONS, June 3 (Reuters) A major UN meeting on AIDS strategy fell short of concrete financial commitments but recognized the growing spread of the disease among women and their right to protect themselves.

Yesterday's session, the last day of a three-day meeting, brought together heads of state, prime ministers and health officials from 151 countries on how to care for 40 million infected people over the next decade.

Some 25 million people have died of AIDS since 1981 and 8,000 die each day of the disease. Women in Africa have surpassed men in contracting the disease.

The final declaration, many activists said, was more positive than they had predicted. Muslim countries, including Iraq, Egypt and Pakistan, at one point resisted commitments on the rights of women or girls.

Still, some 70 groups among the 800 attending denounced the declaration as ''pathetically weak'' on financial goals and rights for girls under 18, many of them in forced marriages.

While the declaration is non-binding, it serves as a basis for many governmental programs and spurs aggressive lobbying by advocacy groups.

The document says billion will be needed annually by 2010 to fight AIDS, more than double the 8.3 billion dollar spent in 2005. Nations agreed to search for additional resources to ensure universal access to treatment by 2010.

But delegations did not commit themselves to a timetable for raising the funds as they did in 2001 when the financial target was met.

The United States led those objecting to international financial goals, although Washington, the largest spender on AIDS prevention and treatment in the developing world, has set its own goals.

Squeamishness over sex was evident this year as in 2001, with Islamic groups and conservative Roman Catholic countries using the term ''vulnerable groups'' rather than referring to prostitutes, homosexuals or drug users as people who had to be reached to prevent the spread of the disease.

''Leadership means finding ways to reach out to all groups -- whether young people, sex workers, injecting drug users or men who have sex with men,'' UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan told the conference several times throughout the week.

First lady Laura Bush told the UN General Assembly that ''every country has an obligation to educate its citizens'' on how AIDS in transmitted. She called on countries to improve literacy so people could make better choices.

PEOPLE LIKE SEX ''I wish we could have been a bit more frank in our document about telling the truth,'' Hilary Benn, Britain's international development secretary, told the conference.

''Abstinence is fine for those who are able to abstain, but human beings like to have sex and they should not die because they do have sex,'' he said.

Yet the document, in addition to abstinence, advocated male and female condoms and ''harm reduction'' efforts related to drug use, a euphemism for needle exchange programs for addicts.

The declaration also called for sex education, reproductive health services and condemned ''abuse, rape and other forms of sexual violence'' as well as trafficking in women and girls.'' ''It seems that the world governments -- including the most conservative countries -- have finally woken up to the fact that young people must have access to comprehensive sex education,'' said Adrienne Germain, president of the International Women's Health Coalition.

U.N. experts say the number of people living with HIV continues to rise, but far more slowly than before. Most Africans, some two-thirds of the 40 million infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, die within 10 years due poor health care and lack of food.

Reuters PDS VP0627

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