Continent must step up prevention efforts to stop HIV/AIDS - AU

Africa, which has the highest number of HIV infections in the world, must scale up its prevention efforts to reverse this trend, said the president of the African Union Commission, Alpha Oumar Konare.

"The responsibility of HIV prevention is not the one of the World Health Organization [WHO] or of UNAIDS. It is ours - we all have to commit ourselves to that," Konare said at the AU headquarters in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, on Tuesday.

Konare was speaking on the occasion of the official launch of the year of "The Acceleration of Prevention of HIV Initiative in the African Region", an initiative of African health ministers aimed at stepping up the pace of HIV prevention on the continent. "Africa is recording the highest rates of people living with AIDS, dying of AIDS, orphaned by AIDS and of new HIV infections," he said. "It is also in Africa that we record the less efficient interventions. Africa must now seize the moment to stop HIV."

Konare launched the initiative together with Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi and several United Nations organisations. According to UNAIDS, of the 5 million new infections recorded globally in 2005, 3.2 million - or 64 percent - were in sub-Saharan Africa.

The launch stemmed from a common declaration signed by the African ministers of health in 2005 declaring 2006 a "Year for Acceleration of HIV Prevention" in the African region. The text of the declaration urged member states to "develop appropriate policies and legislation to create a supportive environment for scaling up HIV prevention interventions, including addressing issues of stigma and discrimination."

It also calls for African leaders to discuss ways of raising awareness about prevention methods, testing and counselling while encouraging governments to make antiretroviral therapy more readily available.

The AU Commission and UN agencies agreed that acceleration of HIV prevention deserved more serious attention in order to achieve universal access to HIV prevention, treatment and care. Fewer than 10 percent of people in Africa know their HIV status, while testing and counselling facilities are available to only about 24 percent of the continent's population, according to UNAIDS. Since the 1980s, 50 million people in Africa have been infected by HIV and 22 million have died, the majority of them in their most productive years.

"After two decades of the pandemic, these figures are not acceptable. Women, youth and populations in the productive age group are the most affected. This is translated into devastating effects on demographic, economic, political and social lives of nations," said Luis Gomes Sambo, WHO's regional director for Africa, who added that the launch should serve as a "wake-up call" to Africa to take concrete measures to stem the pandemic's spread.