The World Health Organization (WHO) and the UN AIDS program said on Wednesday that they would not reach their heavily promoted "3 by 5" goal of treating 3 million HIV-infected poor people by the end of the year.
Officials of several health agencies fighting AIDS blamed problems in the drug supply chain and shortages of health workers.
At the same time, they expressed hope that the number of people dying of the disease annually could stop growing by next year.
About 1 million people in poor countries are receiving antiretroviral drugs, said Dr. Kim Jim-yong, director of the WHO's AIDS department, meaning the program is not on track to reach the goal announced in late 2003. The agency set 3 million as its goal because it seemed to be a reasonable target that could inspire donors and poor countries to act quickly.
Donors have committed US$27 billion over the next three years but have delivered only US$9 billion, the health agencies said.
About 6.5 million of the 40 million people infected are so sick that they are within two years of death and need treatment immediately, officials said Wednesday in a telephone news conference from Geneva, where the WHO is based. For the first time, they included an estimate for desperately ill children -- 660,000, a tenth of the total.
The number of people desperately in need of drugs has grown by about half a million since the treatment goal was announced.
Progress has bogged down for several reasons, health officials said. Many countries have small model treatment programs, but not full-scale national plans.
Problems with drug delivery have been greater than expected, including issues as simple as countries not guaranteeing locked warehouses and trucks for the drugs, which are valuable and toxic if misused. Poor countries have few doctors, nurses and pharmacists.
A ship that appears to be taking on the identity of a scrapped gas carrier exited the Strait of Hormuz on Friday, showing how strategies to get through the waterway are evolving as the Middle East war progresses. The vessel identifying as liquefied natural gas (LNG) carrier Jamal left the Strait on Friday morning, ship-tracking data show. However, the same tanker was also recorded as having beached at an Indian demolition yard in October last year, where it is being broken up, according to market participants and port agent’s reports. The ship claiming to be Jamal is likely a zombie vessel that
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German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) yesterday faced a regional election battle in Rhineland-Palatinate, now held by the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD). Merz’s CDU has enjoyed a narrow poll lead over the SPD — their coalition partners at the national level — who have ruled the mid-sized state for 35 years. Polling third is the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which spells a greater threat to the two centrist parties in several state elections in September in the country’s ex-communist east. The picturesque state of Rhineland-Palatinate, bordering France, Belgium and Luxembourg and with a population of about 4 million,
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