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Dr Piot said that AIDS is no longer simply a public health issue: it cuts across agencies, disciplines, and national boundaries. There is no part of society in the hardest hit areas that is not in some way touched by the epidemic. We are talking not only about health, but about education, agriculture, the economy. AIDS threatens to roll back decades of hard-won development. Indeed, it has become a full-fledged development crisis. During the symposium, Dr Piot addressed the concerns expressed in We The Peoples, the report prepared by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan for the Millennium Summit on the UN's role in the new century. Dr Piot stressed that reform is a two-way process. The United Nations cannot reform without change in the member states. Further he highlighted the "deadly inequalities" of health that continue to divide the world, pointing to the growing AIDS epidemic in developing countries. · Agriculture, which in many developing countries provides a living for as much as four-fifths of the population, is suffering serious disruption. In West Africa, for example, reduced cultivation of cash crops and food products is reported. · The epidemic is undermining basic learning in certain parts of Africa: diminishing funds for school fees, forcing young people into the workforce earlier, and claiming the lives of teachers well before retirement age. In Côte d’Ivoire, 7 out of 10 teacher deaths are due to HIV. In 1998, Zambia lost 1300 teachers in the first ten months of the year - equivalent to two-thirds of the new teachers trained each year. There is growing evidence that in the hardest hit countries of Southern Africa, national wealth will be reduced by 15-20 percent over the next ten years as a result of HIV/AIDS. Lower economic growth and increased poverty threaten to form a vicious cycle, in which HIV/AIDS drives many families into deepening poverty, and at the same time poverty accelerates the spread of HIV. According to We The Peoples, AIDS is "rapidly becoming a social crisis on a global scale". The Secretary-General, building on the agreement reached by the UN General Assembly, calls for a strategy that focuses on young people aged 15 to 24 and on providing care to those living with HIV.
Dr Piot explicitly recommends action to reduce HIV infection rates among young people by 25% in the most affected countries before 2005, and globally by 2010. He also challenges countries to set specific prevention targets: "By 2005 at least 90% and by 2010 at least 95% of young men and women must have access to the information, education and services they need to protect themselves against HIV infection."
Source:
Based on UNAIDS
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