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Rich nations miserly in AIDS fight

Rich nations are proving miserly in funding the launch of a global program to put 3 million poor people infected with AIDS on anti-viral drugs by the end of 2005, a UN envoy said on Wednesday.

The World Health Organization, the UN health agency, announced last year a plan to provide anti-AIDS drugs to 3 million people in developing nations, saying it needed US$200 million this year to get the plan off the ground.

But so far, no money has been contributed for this program and only three nations -- Britain, Spain and Sweden -- have said they will consider a modest pledge, said Stephen Lewis, the UN special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa.

"This is the best chance we've had in more than 20 years to turn the pandemic around," Lewis told a news conference.

"If [the plan] fails, as it surely will without the dollars, then there are no excuses left, no rationalizations to hide behind, no murky slanders to justify indifference. There will only be the mass graves of the betrayed," he said.

As part of the program, the WHO hopes to train 100,000 people to dispense anti-viral drugs in poor nations, he said.

Lewis chided the Group of Seven leading financial powers -- the US, Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Italy and Canada. -- in particular, for spending more on military defense than fighting AIDS in impoverished nations.

"We can't raise one-tenth of 1 percent of what we're spending on war and reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan, to break the back of the pandemic," he said.

Some 65 million people have contracted AIDS in the last 20 years and 28 million of them are dead, including 15 million in sub-Sahara Africa. Entire communities are wrecked and 14 million children have lost at least one parent, UN figures show.
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