An international group of AIDS experts has appealed to the world's industrial powers to give more funds to efforts to control the disease. They say that the money raised so far is not nearly enough to stop what could be a global catastrophe.
Twenty-three million people worldwide have already lost their lives to AIDS, and more than three million are expected to die of the disease this year, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. Experts are now warning that the AIDS epidemic could decimate Africa and parts of the Caribbean within a decade if it goes unchecked.
Writing in the science journal, Nature, on the eve of the G8 summit in Genoa, the group of experts under the leading authority on AIDS, Peter Hale, have come together to make a plea for donor countries to increase their funding tenfold. So far, governments have committed £700m to the UN AIDS fund set up by Kofi Annan.
Mr Hale and his colleagues are calling for that funding to be increased to over £7bn. Otherwise, they say, there are likely to be one billion AIDS cases in the next 50 years, with some countries virtually collapsing as their populations decline.
