The crisis over funding the global fight against AIDS has emerged as the key issue at the 15th International AIDS Conference in Bangkok, Thailand.
Speaking at the world forum on the disease, the European Vice President of the World Bank, Jean-Francois Richard, said that the international community was ‘very slow and inefficient’ at solving problems such as the AIDS crisis.
Mr Richard warned that the cost of the battle against the disease could be even more than the $20bn a year that the UN estimates will be needed by 2007.
The director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, Richard Feachem, said that the world stood at a point of launching a ‘massive scale-up’ of the prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS, but that it would be ‘extremely expensive’.
Opening the conference earlier, the UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, warned the international community that it was not doing enough to fight the AIDS pandemic.
Mr Annan said that leadership was the key to defeating AIDS and said that the targets to combat and impact the AIDS epidemic by 2005 were not being met.
