Donors urge greater AIDS commitment

Partners in Mozambique's fight against HIV/AIDS have called for greater government commitment and more ambitious targets. Marcia Colquhoun, of the Irish embassy, told a gathering in the capital, Maputo, on Friday, that despite the treatment gains made in 2005, only eight percent of adults and three percent of children who needed antiretrovirals had access to them. She was also strongly critical of government failure to address mother-to-child HIV transmission, and noted that only five percent of HIV-positive pregnant women received treatment to prevent them from infecting their unborn babies. "We must reaffirm the emergency character of the national response to AIDS ... [by] establishing ambitious targets, and guaranteeing the allocation of human and financial resources adequate to those targets," the official news agency, AIM, quoted Colquhoun as saying.