Top researchers, policymakers and activists head to Bangkok this week to assess the global AIDS pandemic as the killer disease is poised to ravage Eastern Europe and Asia's most populous countries.
Up to 20,000 people are registered for the conference starting on Sunday, making it the biggest potential turnout for any meeting in the 23-year history of AIDS and the first time this key event will be held in a developing country in Asia.
Ahead of the conference, the UN agency UNAIDS will tomorrow issue its first detailed update on the world epidemic in two years, giving the latest estimated toll of deaths and new infections and country-by-country figures.
PHOTO: AFP
Since it first came to light in 1981, acquired immune deficiency syndrome has left no cranny of the world unscathed.
According to previous estimates, the disease had claimed some 25 million to 26 million lives as of last year, and around 40 million people were living with the disease or the virus that causes it. Around 14,000 more people each day become infected.
There is no cure for HIV, only antiretroviral drugs which keep the virus at bay and which are only just now starting to trickle into poor countries that need them most. And any vaccine to prevent infection seems to lie years away.
Ironically, says UNAIDS Executive Director Peter Piot, the picture is brighter today than it has been in years.
"The landscape of AIDS has changed quite dramatically," he said in a phone interview. "In developing countries, our work has changed, especially in Africa."
The main improvement, he said, is that money is at last starting to flow in big volumes, with funds reaching more than US$5 billion this year alone.
This is still not enough to meet needs, but -- combined with big price cuts for drugs -- it has given a kickstart to the UN's goal of providing three million poor people with antiretroviral therapy by the end of next year.
China, India and Indonesia -- Asia's Big Three, accounting for more than a third of humanity -- are ripe targets for AIDS, as are the former Soviet-bloc countries, experts say.
Each nation is different, but a common thread binds them. The bitter experience of the US, Europe and Africa shows how ignorance, stigma, official indifference and poor resources become a lethal combination, enabling the virus to leap out of small, localized demographic pools and into the population mainstream.
"The handshake of [Chinese] Premier Wen Jiabao (
But, he said, the level of political awareness was not the same in Eastern Europe, facing the fastest-growing HIV spread of any region in the world.
As for India and its neighbors, "the leaders are in a state of denial and there is a very high level of discomfort to even talk about it," Praful Patel, the World Bank's regional vice president, complained last Wednesday. "[They thought] HIV-AIDS is an African problem and it cannot happen in South Asia."
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
STEADFAST DART: The six-week exercise, which involves about 10,000 troops from nine nations, focuses on rapid deployment scenarios and multidomain operations NATO is testing its ability to rapidly deploy across eastern Europe — without direct US assistance — as Washington shifts its approach toward European defense and the war in Ukraine. The six-week Steadfast Dart 2025 exercises across Bulgaria, Romania and Greece are taking place as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine approaches the three-year mark. They involve about 10,000 troops from nine nations and represent the largest NATO operation planned this year. The US absence from the exercises comes as European nations scramble to build greater military self-sufficiency over their concerns about the commitment of US President Donald Trump’s administration to common defense and
RSS