Editorial: Action on Aids vital for all the world

The global fight against Aids can harbour no complacency. The threat posed by the pandemic is simply too great. As much was stressed time and again at the global Aids conference in Bangkok. The United States, through a State Department spokesman, put it aptly. Aids, it said, was "the greatest threat of mass destruction on the face of the planet in the present age".

Yet behind such rhetoric, there lay hints that complacency may, indeed, have taken hold. The very strength of the US statement reflected conference criticism of its drug and funding policies. Activists and Aids sufferers stressed that the US was not addressing seriously an illness that continues to infect 14,000 people a day.

It would be unfair to single out the US, however. The threat seems underrated in this and probably every country where the prevalence is low and the danger is perceived as being restricted to a limited number of high-risk groups.

That view disregards the grim reality of Africa, south and south-east Asia and the Caribbean, where much of the population is at risk. And from where there is a frightening potential for the disease to spread to the likes of New Zealand, given the degree of travel and interchange in the modern world. This danger, if nothing else, should galvanise a more concerted and co-ordinated global response.

The enormity and urgency of the problem was, in fact, recognised by a panel of the world's top economists at last month's Copenhagen Consensus conference - as, in terms of the world's 10 biggest challenges, was the potential for Aids to offer the best reward in cost-benefit terms. Combating it was seen as more realistic than, say, fighting malnutrition through food supplements or controlling malaria.

At present, entire societies, especially in Africa, are close to collapse. In too many areas, knowledge about the illness is scant, or corrupted by myth. Too many anti-Aids strategies have been misdirected or failed to help those most at risk. There has been a tardy response to a change that sees the virus taking greater hold among women because of their social and biological vulnerability.

The Bangkok conference should, at the very least, have delivered a much-needed focus to these issues. The anger directed at those deemed as belittling the problem was warranted. As was the ridiculing of unrealistic responses, such as the Bush Administration's plea for sexual abstinence. A commitment to programmes that provide education and foster new attitudes is overdue - for the sake of all the world.