Think-tank says "UN is making AIDS worse"

The United Nations was accused, on World AIDS Day, of worsening the HIV/AIDS problem by a catalog of strategic errors, according to the International Policy Network, a London, UK-based think-tank. Philip Stevens, the group's health program director, criticized the UN and the World Health Organization's alleged "abject failure" to cope with the problem.

Mr Stevens said that, "since 2000, the UN has focused myopically on treating those already infected, while ignoring the vital task of prevention. As a direct result, the total number of infected people continues to grow." The UN's AIDS organization (UNAIDS) only decided to shift resources to prevention in August this year, according to the IPN. Mr Stevens asked: "why has no one in UNAIDS been held accountable for this gross strategic error?"

The problem of untested triple combination antiretroviral drugs, which were withdrawn in 2004 by the WHO, was the emergence of drug-resistant strains of HIV/AIDS, particularly in Thailand, Mr Stevens said. He predicted that, "as more and more patients in poor countries develop drug resistance, the astronomical cost of putting millions of patients on second-line treatments could bankrupt entire health care systems."