Geldof, Tutu to attend AIDS conference

SINGER and third world campaigner Bob Geldof and Archbishop Desmond Tutu will be in Dublin later this month for the largest-ever conference on the escalating HIV/AIDS problem in Europe and Central Asia.

Delegates from over 55 European and Central Asian countries will participate in Breaking the Barriers on February 23 and 24.

It is the first of three conferences on AIDS being convened by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Minister for Overseas Development Tom Kitt as part of Ireland's EU Presidency.

The two subsequent conferences will examine the problem in Africa and progress on research into retro-viral vaccines.

Mr Kitt said yesterday, two of the global agencies combating the disease, UN AIDS and UNICEF, had told him the EU was not doing enough unsurprisingly, the focus until now had been on Africa where 27 million are affected.

However, while access to life-extending anti-retroviral treatment in Western Europe has seen the AIDS death rate plummet from 20,000 in 1996 to around 3,500 in 2003, new infections have risen sharply in recent years in many countries, including Ireland.

But this is overshadowed by dramatic rises in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. As many as one million may have HIV in Russia; statistics for the Baltic States and Central Asia are equally worrying.

While many affected are intravenous drug users, there is strong evidence to show the disease increasingly spreading to the non-drug using population by sexual transmission.

Heroin users in Russia are regarded as criminals with little emphasis on their medical needs. Condom use is low in many of the countries and expensive modern anti-retroviral drugs are effectively non-existent.