AIDS STILL A SCOURGE

UN Director Continues Worldwide Campaign

WORCESTER-- If AIDS is to be brought under control any time in the
near future, it will be in large part because of courageous decisions
made in spite of public opinion, the executive director of UNAIDS
told an overflow crowd of about 200 at the Clark University Traina
Center for the Arts last night.

That kind of courage will be needed all around the world, in Cape
Town, in Geneva and in Worcester, said Peter Piot, who is also
under-secretary general of the United Nations.

Mr. Piot said clean needle exchange programs are needed to slow the
spread of HIV among intravenous drug users.

To those who say handing clean needles to heroin addicts sends the
wrong message, an argument frequently used by opponents of such
programs, Mr. Piot said, "The right message is we want to save as
many lives as possible." Needle exchange, he said, is gaining
momentum worldwide, having been implemented in countries where the
disease rate is growing, such as China, Malaysia, Vietnam and Iran.
"This, for me, is an example of courageous politics," he said.

In many countries in the developing world, social stigmas have
inhibited progress against the spread of HIV, he said. Condom use,
for example, is promoted to positive effect, but at the same time
political leaders refuse to talk about the effect on their national
rates of infection of sexual violence and the ways in which women are
treated, he said. And for years, around the world, governments
refused to acknowledge the AIDS pandemic, referring to it derisively
as "the gay plague," he said. No one in political life, he said,
wants to be associated with a disease of the gay and junkie populations.

"Here we have a virus that really exposes the fault lines in
society," Mr. Piot said.

UNAIDS was created in 1995 and Mr. Piot has been its executive
director ever since.

"It's fair to say that in a quarter of a century, AIDS has made it to
one of the make-or-break issues of our time," he said. "It is now in
an altogether different league; the league of global change, of
climate change, or massive poverty, of chronic armed conflicts. And a
disease that we had not even heard of 25 years ago has made it as the
first cause of death for men and women under 60 in the world. There
is no precedent for that in our recent history."

Mr. Piot has an M.D. from the University of Ghent, and a Ph.D. in
microbiology from the University of Antwerp, Belgium, his home
country. He has done extensive field work in Africa and in 1976 was a
co-discoverer of the Ebola virus in Zaire. He has written 16 books
and more than 500 scientific articles.

In a way, he said, the fact that the AIDS epidemic has struck the
United States is helpful to the rest of the world because so much of
the medical research on the disease is conducted here. If the disease
had not registered here, he said, there would be no market incentive
for American companies to develop drug therapy treatments. And those
treatments, he said, continually need to be replaced because the
virus has been so effective in fighting back against anti-retroviral drugs.

Mr. Piot said people who try to fight AIDS or work on any political
agenda through the Internet will not be nearly as effective as people
who are willing to take to the streets, organizing and demonstrating.

"Don't ever think it's too late to do something," he said. "AIDS is
going to be with us for quite a while."