U.N. AIDS Conference Gets Under Way

June 25 -- One by one, representatives of some 60 nations stood before the U.N. General Assembly today and offered a common plea in dealing with the AIDS crisis: Help.

The appeals marked the opening of a three-day special session on AIDS, which was complicated by Islamic objections over mentions of homosexuality and prostitution.

"AIDS can no longer do its deadly work in the dark," U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in his opening remarks. Annan urged leaders to put aside their differences and face the facts of the epidemic.

"We cannot deal with AIDS by making moral judgments or refusing to face unpleasant facts and still less by stigmatizing those who are infected and making out it is all their fault," Annan added.

The unprecedented gathering brings together 3,000 experts, patients, activists and world leaders for a debate expected to range from new treatments and how to pay for them, to getting the treatments to patients in developing nations.

A $10 Billion Campaign

So far, 22 million people around the world have died from AIDS, and millions more are infected with HIV, the virus believed to cause AIDS. By 2005, it's believed that 100 million people will be infected.

"The future of our continent is bleak, to say the least,"Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo said. "The prospect ofextinction of the entire population of a continent looms larger andlarger."

To help with the fight, Obasanjo and other African leaders called for all of Africa's debt to be canceled so the money can be used for health and social programs. Annan called for a global AIDS fund of up to $10 billion.

The United States already has pledged $200 million to the effort. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, who addressed the session, acknowledged the world has not responded well enough when he called the global response "woefully inadequate."

"I was a soldier but I know of no enemy in war more insidious or vicious than AIDS," Powell said. "The world wants us to act. We must act and we must act now."