WORLD 'LOSING FIGHT AGAINST AIDS' !

Dr Fauci says there must be greater effort to boost prevention. US President George W Bush's top adviser on HIV/Aids has said the world is losing the battle against the virus. Dr Anthony Fauci told a conference in Sydney that progress had been made, but more people were being infected with HIV than were being treated. "For every one person that you put in therapy, six new people get infected. So we're losing that game, the numbers game," he said. Dr Fauci was speaking at a gathering of the world's leading HIV/Aids experts.

Three years ago, fewer than 300,000 people in the developing world had access to the anti-retroviral drugs that help treat the deadly virus. Last year, the figure had risen to 2.2 million, but new infections continue to outpace the global effort to treat and educate patients. The HIV epidemic is essentially uncontrolled, uncontrolled in Africa, uncontrolled completely in Asia right now

Dr Brian Gazzard, British HIV Association"Although we are making major improvements in the access to drugs, clearly prevention must be addressed in a very forceful way," said Dr Fauci, the director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. But in many parts of the developing world, effective prevention strategies like condoms and sterile syringes are available to less than 15% of the population. "The proven prevention modalities are not accessible to any substantial proportion of the people who need them," Dr Fauci said.

Dr Fauci's warning was echoed by Dr Brian Gazzard, chairman of the British HIV Association, who said that while advances were being made in extending access to anti-retroviral drugs, the disease was running out of control in parts of Asia and Africa. "The HIV epidemic is essentially uncontrolled, uncontrolled in Africa, uncontrolled completely in Asia right now," he said. Only a quarter of the people needing treatment were receiving it, meaning the other three-quarters would continue to spread the epidemic, which was still in its exponential growth stage, Dr Gazzard said.

The Australian conference's 5,000 delegates are drawn from more than 130 countries. Participants at the forum are being urged to sign a declaration, aimed at boosting HIV research, which proposes that HIV programmes should devote at least 10% of spending on research. The so-called Sydney Declaration's central message is that governments need to dedicate more resources to HIV research if the world is to effectively combat the Aids pandemic.

The document says this will help speed up the implementation of new drugs and technologies to prevent, diagnose and treat an infection which has already killed 25 million people.

BBC NEWS REPORT.