HIV/AIDS response at a crossroads; The 2006 UN High-level Meeting: 'Uniting the World against AIDS'.

• Author: Pont, Amy

ON THE OCCASION OF THE twenty-fifth anniversary of the first identification of HIV/AIDS cases, the UN General Assembly held a high-level meeting on "Uniting the World against AIDS" and called upon hundreds of participants--from Heads of State or Government to civil society, and from AIDS researchers to people living with HIV--for a joint review of the progress made in the global fight against the epidemic. In a quarter of a century, more than 65 million people have been infected with HIV, 25 million have died and 40 million are living with the virus.

In his closing remarks, General Assembly President Jan Eliasson told participants that "while we have been meeting, over 20,000 people have died as a result of AIDS" and 30,000 have been newly infected with HIV. However, he commended the increasingly united response to the epidemic by recognizing the "unprecedented level of constructive and substantive interaction between Member States and civil society.... We come from different backgrounds and have different tactics, but we need each other."

Many individuals from the business world and AIDS advocacy supporters from the entertainment industry also attended the conference, which was held from 31 May to 2 June 2006 at UN Headquarters in New York. In order to plan for a collaborative response, participants reviewed a number of important documents: the Secretary-General's progress report on the Declaration of Commitment on HIV/AIDS: five years later, as well as two reports by the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS)--Towards universal access, an assessment on scaling up HIV prevention, treatment, care and support, and the 2006 Report on the global AIDS epidemic. The result was a set of new initiatives and targets that were summed up in the Political Declaration on HIV/AIDS (see box), adopted by the Assembly at the end of the meeting on 2 June.

The conference also came at the five-year point since the adoption by the historic 2001 Special Session of the General Assembly of the Declaration of Commitment on HIV/AIDS, in which Member States committed themselves to comprehensive, time-bound targets in the areas of prevention, treatment, care and resource allocation. Attempts to reach these goals were recorded in the UNAIDS 2006 Report--the most extensive set of data ever released on the response to the crisis, detailing the varied progress made by countries since 2001 in their fight against the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Virtually every...