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Experts say global HIV/AIDS programmes are facing massive financing shortfalls in the coming years, as countries balk at setting new funding targets at a UN High Level Meeting on the pandemic in New York this week.
Urging wealthy nations to live up their commitments, Stephen Lewis, the UN Special Envoy for AIDS in Africa, warned that a lack of funds could result in millions of HIV-positive people going untreated.
"It is almost beyond belief that we could have reached the point in 2006, that it would have come to begging, cap in hand," he told reporters.
Lewis estimated that some US$5 billion would be needed this year, with an additional $8 billion in 2007 to meet the Millennium Development Goal of universal access to treatment by 2010.
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