Former Botswana President Festus Mogae appealed to African leaders not to be afraid to take controversial steps to stop HIV/AIDS at the opening of the 17th International AIDS Conference in Mexico City on Sunday night.

Mogae has been actively lobbying key African leaders over the past few months to come together to form an HIV/AIDS initiative and has raised funds for such a forum, according to reliable sources.

He made a passionate appeal last night for ‘€œnew vigour’€ to address HIV/AIDS in Africa, saying that what was needed was ‘€œvolunteerism, activism and leadership’€. ‘€œ

African leaders must come together to open dialogue amongst ourselves for conversation and learning about what works,’€ said Mogae.

‘€œSouthern Africa is disproportionately affected by HIV/AIDS. Two thirds of people with HIV worldwide and 90% of children with HIV live in this region,’€ said Mogae.

‘€œIn some countries, HIV is stabilizing but at such high levels that they defy belief,’€ said Mogae.

Some 26% of adult Swazis, 25% of adults in Lesotho, 24% of Batswana and 18% of adult South Africans were HIV positive.

Mogae praised the roll-out of antiretroviral therapy, pointing out that Botswana’€™s treatment programme was reaching 90% of those who needed it while only 4% of his country’€™s mothers with HIV were transmitting it to their babies.

‘€œA few years ago, it seemed impossible to give antiretroviral therapy in Africa,’€ said Mogae. ‘€œWhile 15 years ago, no one knew how to prevent a baby from getting HIV from its mother.’€ But, he warned, ‘€œwe cannot treat this epidemic away’€. Effective HIV prevention campaigns were urgently needed.

He said ‘€œnew vigour’€ was needed to address the drivers of the epidemic, namely the practice of multiple and concurrent partners, girls starting to have sex at an early age, and community support for those with HIV to prevent further HIV transmission.

‘€œWe should not be afraid to take controversial steps as long as we are caring and careful of people’€™s rights,’€ said Mogae.

A few years back, Botswana started to routinely test people for HIV at hospitals and clinics unless they refused. At the time it was controversial, but it no longer was, he said.

Governments needed to distinguish between human rights which were ‘€œsacrosanct’€ and civil rights, which were ‘€œcontextual’€, said Mogae.

To illustrate this, he said during a recent measles outbreak, some parents did not want their children immunized but health officials had immunized all children and had thus contained the outbreak. In this case, their civil rights may have been violated but not their human rights, said Mogae.

Earlier in the day, Medicins sans Frontieres reported that about 70 percent of people living with HIV/AIDS who need antiretroviral therapy (ART) are still not receiving it and the growing numbers of those who have been started on ART have only increased the burden on health care workers, who are already in short supply.

‘€œThey have little time to dedicate to proper treatment and follow up of their many patients, potentially resulting in low quality of care and treatment interruption as patients become discouraged by the long waiting times for consultations,’€ said the organisation.

‘€œIn Thyolo district, Malawi, one nurse keeps 400 patients alive by following up their essential treatment, but her basic salary amounts to just $3 a day,’€ said MSF’€™s medical coordinator in Malawi, Dr. Moses Massaquoi.

Some 23 000 delegates from all over the world are meeting over this week to discuss the latest scientific advances and to share ideas about how to address HIV/AIDS over the next week at the conference, which is the biggest in the world to address a single epidemic. ‘€“ health-e news.