(London) AIDS has become as big a threat to world peace as terrorism but the major nations have their heads buried in the sand the chief the United Nations AIDS agency says.
UNAIDS Executive Director Peter Piot said that the US and the European Union need to put as much energy and resources into combating HIV/AIDS as it does fighting al-Quaida.
“It’s as big of a threat as terrorism,” Piot said this week in Oslo, referring to massive poverty as a result of AIDS, sparking political unrest which could lead to cross-border conflicts, as well as a weakening of defense forces in heavily infected countries.
“Millions of orphans, children with no future, it’s enough that there is a warlord who puts a Kalashnikov in their hands.”
Piot calls the spread of AIDS “an earthquake in slow motion.”
More than half of the military forces in some poor African states are infected with HIV, children have been orphaned, many schools have no teachers and companies no staff because of HIV and AIDS, he said.
AIDS is the number one killer in Africa, the home of at least 70 percent of the world’s 40 million HIV-infected people. But sub Saharan Africa is no longer the only crisis zone, he said, and slammed the European Union for failing to cope with the fast-growing epidemic in Eastern Europe as the EU expands.
The former Soviet bloc has seen a 50-fold increase in HIV infections in the past eight years, to around 1.5 million --the most dramatic rise in the world.
“The EU has failed in dealing with AIDS at its borders, at its doorsteps, including in some of the new enlargement countries,” Piot said.
When Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, along with Malta and Cyprus, formally join the EU from May 1, they will raise its population to 450 million from 380 million.
Piot called on the EU to designate one commission to manage the fight against AIDS, saying there was so far no clear definition of responsibility within the Union.
“Some of the enlargement countries have done very well, like Poland, but the Baltic states have big problems,” Piot said.
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