Activists urged delegates and world leaders to speed up and increase the world’€™s response to the epidemic which last year killed three million people and is responsible for more than 20 million deaths since the first cases of AIDS were identified in 1981.

South Africa remains the country with the highest number of people living with HIV/AIDS ‘€“ some 5,3 million citizens – according to the latest report released by UNAIDS last week.

Brazilian activists, whose country has been at the forefront of producing generic drugs to offer free treatment to its citizens in need, called for the rules of patents, copyright treaties and trade agreements to be suspended in favour of health needs rather than economic interests.

According to the UNAIDS, globally almost five million people were newly infected with HIV in 2003, the greatest number in any one year since the beginning of the epidemic. Globally 38 million people are estimated to be living with HIV/AIDS and last year almost three million people died from AIDS-related illnesses.

In his address to the opening ceremony United Nations Secretary General Koffi Annan said the fight against the pandemic was far more than a health crisis, ‘€œit is a threat to development itself.’€

Annan said women accounted for nearly half of all adult infections worldwide and in Africa made up 58 percent of the number of people living with HIV/AIDS. Among youths under the age of 24, young women comprised nearly two thirds of those living with HIV.

He said infrastructure had to be improved and extended to support both treatment and prevention, citing successful programmes in Africa, Latin America and Asia which had shown that prevention and treatment can work in any setting providing they were developed from within countries rather than imposed from the outside and providing there were enough trained people to provide relevant programmes from counselling and testing to treatment and care.

 Film stars mingled with scientists and health ministers at the conference’€™s opening ceremony as the likes of Richard Gere and Rupert Everett are here to lend their support to various prevention and treatment campaigns.

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