A five-day meeting on AIDS ended here Saturday with a call to increase the promotion of HIV/AIDS prevention methods as one of the critical ways of combating the scourge.

The participants at the conference, which was held under the theme, 'Scaling Up Through Partnerships: Overcoming Obstacles to Implementation', observed that prevention of HIV/AIDS has not been given much attention as treatment and yet it is one of the sure ways of combating the disease.

"Our chief weapon against HIV/AIDS has always been and must continue to be prevention," said Janet Museveni, Uganda's First Lady, while closing the conference.

"People need not only to learn but also be reminded constantly that their own line of defense against this killer disease which has no cure is to avoid contracting it in the first place," she said.

Joy Phumaphi, Vice President of Human Development at the World Bank said prevention of the pandemic needs to be emphasized because treating of HIV/AIDS patients is expensive and has major economic impacts on countries.

"It is more urgent for us to arrest the spread of epidemic than it has ever been," she said.

According to UNAIDS, the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS, although the rate of new infections has fallen globally, the number of people newly infected has increased in a number of countries.

Statistics of the agency shows while an additional 1 million people were put on antiretroviral treatment in 2007, 2.5 million people were newly infected.

It is estimated that 33.2 million people worldwide were living with HIV as of December 2007.

The conference called on countries to come up with their own national strategies to fight the scourge because the drivers of HIV/AIDS in one country are not the same as in another.

[Close] [comment]