Africa needs $3 billion more to fight AIDS: Report
Nearly 30 million living with virus
`Stakes could not be higher,' U.N. warns
Sep. 22, 2003. 01:00 AM
NAIROBI—The United Nations AIDS group warned yesterday of a massive $3-billion (U.S.) 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 programs, the report, Accelerating Action Against AIDS in Africa 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 U.S. 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 program of prevention and treatment, the AIDS death toll was expected to continue rising before peaking 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 organization said in its report. "In high-prevalence countries, families are unravelling, economies are slowing down, and social services deteriorating."
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.
REUTERS
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