|
|
 |
 |
 |
| Friday, 5 March 2004 |
 |
|
 |
World | |
| News Business Features Editorial Security Politics World Letters Sports Obituaries
|
UNESCO boss sounds alarm on AIDS in South Asia LIVINGSTONE, Zambia, Thursday (AFP) UNESCO Director General Koichiro Matsuura sounded an alarm on the increase of AIDS in South Asia, saying it was rising "very rapidly" there. He was speaking in Livingstone, Zambia, on the eve of a conference on the pandemic in the Victoria Falls resort between UN agencies and southern African ministers. As in Africa, Matsuura said, AIDS in South Asia was spreading primarily through "heterogeneous sex" between men and women, but South Asia had the advantage of stronger infrastructure in health services and education. "In South Asia," he told AFP in an interview, "the trend is upward - it is rising very rapidly. "Some countries want to hide its extent," he said, but some South Asian leaders, such as those in Thailand, were making a concerted effort to stop the disease spreading. In China, he added, there was a "new trend," with its leaders giving more priority to fighting AIDS. "We have to protect young people," he said. "Education is crucial. "The more education children have, the less likely they are to catch AIDS. We propose sex education for girls in particular." The meeting in Livingstone, a regular six-monthly get-together of agencies involved in the UN AIDS body UNAIDS, which UNESCO is currently chairing, is usually held in New York or Europe, but switched this time at Zambia's invitation to focus on the "epicentre" of the disease in southern Africa. At the end of 2003, the UN estimates, 26.6 million people in countries south of the Sahara desert were HIV-positive out of a world total of 65 million. The Livingstone meeting on Thursday will see the UN agency heads meeting the ministers of health, finance and education from Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe. In January, he said, he visited Ghana with his wife Takako, and an AIDS victim there died holding his wife's hand - "that was very shocking". Livingstone, on the border with Zimbabwe, is a hot-spot for AIDS, as are most frontier towns in Africa, with cheap prostitutes servicing long-distance truck drivers who spread the disease everywhere they go. |
|
News | Business | Features
| Editorial | Security
Produced by Lake House |
