SECRETARY-GENERAL SAYS HARVARD AIDS INSTITUTE HAS 'DEMONSTRATED GENUINE GLOBAL LEADERSHIP ON ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT GLOBAL ISSUES OF OUR TIME'
Press Release
SG/SM/6945
SECRETARY-GENERAL SAYS HARVARD AIDS INSTITUTE HAS 'DEMONSTRATED GENUINE GLOBAL LEADERSHIP ON ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT GLOBAL ISSUES OF OUR TIME'
19990405 CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY Following is the text of an address delivered today in New York by Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the Harvard AIDS Institute:Thank you, Mr. Tempelsman, for that wonderful introduction. I am truly honoured to be speaking to you this evening. Over the course of 10 short years, the Harvard AIDS Institute has demonstrated genuine global leadership on one of the most important global issues of our time.
Building research capacity in the developing world has always been a top priority of the Institute. Through your long-standing commitment in Africa, you have set a unique example, not least in this country. You have helped people understand that AIDS is far more than a medical problem. You have helped this nation understand that AIDS is far more than a national problem. And you have helped the world understand that AIDS is far from over.
I am proud to join you in paying tribute to the remarkable women we are honouring tonight: women who bring home to us that changing the world begins with changing people's minds and the environment in which they live; women who have understood that the silent prejudice surrounding this disease must be countered by actions that speak louder than words; women who are living proof that the weapons in the war against this virus are compassion, courage and commitment.
Those qualities bring to mind an absent friend to whom we also give thanks this evening. Somebody who, though he cannot be with us in person, remains in our thoughts because his gift to humankind endures: Jonathan Mann.
Jonathan Mann was -- rightly -- known as the architect of the global mobilization against AIDS. Tonight we also remember him as someone who touched us personally; he was the human link between our two organizations.
At Harvard, he devoted himself to AIDS research and advocacy, to health and human rights. And he created the first AIDS programme of the United Nations.
Under Jonathan Mann, what began on the wings of hope, a shoestring budget and the help of one assistant grew into the biggest programme of the World Health Organization -- with a staff of more than 200 people and a budget of more than $100 million.
It was the precursor to UNAIDS, the partnership of United Nations agencies led so ably by Peter Piot and spanning issues from prevention to development.
Dr. Mann said many times that the way you define a problem will determine what you do about it. And thus he became instrumental in helping developing countries rally around a common cause -- to work together against AIDS.
Ten years have passed since another dinner, at which Jonathan Mann told the AIDS Action Committee: "Against AIDS we will prevail together, for we will refuse to be split, or to cast into the shadows those persons, groups or nations that are affected."
Today, more than 33 million people live in the threat of the shadow. More than 14 million lives have been extinguished. By the year 2000, some 10 million children will have lost their mother to AIDS.
In many parts of Africa, whole nations live under the shadow. Today, an average child born in Botswana can expect to live 47 years -- as opposed to a life expectancy of more than 60 years in 1995, before the epidemic reached tidal wave proportions.
For every minute that passed today, as you and I were going about the routine business of our lives, six young people were infected.
Today, like yesterday, Africa buried five and a half thousand people who died of AIDS.
The impact on so many individuals and their families is an unspeakable tragedy for them. It is also devastating to the economies of their countries. AIDS is unravelling fragile and hard-won success stories throughout the developing world. It is taking away breadwinners and carers. It is destroying the very fabric of society.
- 3 - Press Release SG/SM/6945 5 April 1999
In South Africa -- such a lodestar of hope to the entire continent on its final victory over apartheid five years ago -- one in five pregnant women is infected. In the Ivory Coast, a teacher is dying of AIDS every day.
In Malawi, half the teachers are infected. In this way, AIDS is taking away not only Africa's present; it is taking away Africa's future.
And we have begun to witness a disturbing trend in developing countries: the disease is affecting women disproportionately.
More than 14 million women worldwide are now infected; at least a million women contract the virus every year. By the year 2000, women will make up almost half of all people living with HIV and AIDS.
In sub-Saharan Africa, AIDS now kills more women each year than men.
Women's vulnerable status in society leaves them particularly vulnerable to infection. They are more at risk because of practices that are all too prevalent: men's relations outside marriage; relations between older men and much younger women or even girls; the threat of violence against women; the subordinate role of women in the household.
Worse still, HIV/AIDS among women leads in turn to an increase in incidence of the disease among infants. Women often bear a double or triple burden, since they must care for their sick husbands and children at the same time.
And so it goes on. Driven by poverty and poor awareness, AIDS leaves society even poorer and less aware, and therefore even more vulnerable to infection. It seems an unending downward spiral of death and despair.
Yet against all this, there are strong forces at work; forces of hope and faith. Yes, the women of the developing world bear far more than their fair share of the burden. But in many developing countries, it is also the women who are leading the counter-attack.
Take Zimbabwe, for example: few countries are worse affected. One in every four adults has the virus. In the capital, Harare, almost 40 per cent of pregnant women are HIV positive. More than 360,000 children have already lost their mothers, or often both parents, to the disease.
Against this backdrop, Zimbabwean women like Priscilla Misi-hai-rabwi of the Women and AIDS Support Network are educating, counselling and organizing women and girls to take action: to make informed choices about their own health; to communicate with sexual partners about HIV and safer sex; to lobby policy makers for better protection of women's health. They also provide
- 4 - Press Release SG/SM/6945 5 April 1999
compassionate care to women affected by HIV/AIDS -- both to those infected with the virus themselves, and to family members who are affected by the illness of their loved ones.
They helped teach Zimbabwe -- and the world -- that this disease feeds on the unfair treatment of women by men. And they organized a successful petition drive in response to which the Government agreed to make the female condom available throughout Zimbabwe.
Like the women here tonight, Priscilla and her friends have shown us that we are not powerless.
Inspired by them, we must make people everywhere understand that this is not over; that this is not about a few foreign countries, far away; that this is a threat to an entire generation; that this is a threat to an entire civilization.
As always, our first motto must be: know thine enemy. Fighting AIDS begins with understanding it. As the latest report from UNAIDS reminds us, it is not easy to determine exactly how and why AIDS spreads like wildfire in one country or region and not in another. Many factors converge in a given time and place.
Among the most vulnerable are people who have left their homes, whether individually or en masse, and who have become inured to risk and danger. AIDS rates are high, for instance, among migrant labourers in South Africa and among soldiers in Cambodia.
Scientists at the Harvard AIDS Institute have been at the forefront of finding biological explanations for -- and strategies against -- the rapid spread of AIDS in Africa.
The same strain of the virus which is now spreading from southern to eastern Africa is also the major cause of the epidemic in India; another form is moving ahead in China.
"Drug cocktails" have made a huge difference in this country and elsewhere in the prosperous West. In the United States, AIDS death rates fell by almost 50 per cent between 1996 and 1997; although HIV mutates so fast and so effectively that researchers and clinicians are hard-pressed to keep ahead of it.
But even if the cocktail were medicine's answer to the AIDS epidemic, it is an answer far beyond the economic reach of countries where answers are needed most desperately. For more than 95 per cent of people living with
- 5 - Press Release SG/SM/6945 5 April 1999
HIV-AIDS today, the $10,000 to $60,000 annual price-tag of an anti-retroviral regime belongs, quite simply, in a different universe.
Prevention efforts to promote responsible sexual behaviour can, will and must continue. We must help create the social, economic and political environment to make this possible.
But in the long term, the only hope of stamping out this epidemic must be an effective vaccine.
The merits of one approach or another to vaccine development may be debated; the necessity of a vaccine is not. Dr. Max Essex and his colleagues have dedicated themselves not only to identifying viable vaccine candidates, but also to making sure that those vaccines are safe and effective for the people who need them most.
We must keep our eyes on that prize, and not stumble when the inevitable setbacks, objections and controversies rear up to block the view.
The war against AIDS has to be fought on many fronts. We have not won on any one of them yet; we are undefeated only because we have kept trying. Jonathan Mann summed it up: "People say there is no use trying to change the world. But if we don't try, will it change?"
In one African language, the name for AIDS translates as "shame has fallen on the Earth". And shame will indeed fall on the Earth if we turn our backs on those affected and cast them into the shadows. Shame will fall upon us all if we do not wipe out every trace of prejudice and discrimination surrounding this disease.
If anything can save the Earth from shame, it is the work of people like you and women like Priscilla, whose struggle you help to sustain.
The United Nations thanks you, and will give you every support it can. Allow me to add my personal heartfelt thanks to you all.
* *** *