Battle against Aids 'will be slow' Progress to halt the spread of HIV in Africa will take years rather than months, leading experts warned on Monday. Dr Peter Piot, head of the United Nations Aids Program, told an international conference on Aids in Africa in Lusaka, Zambia, that it would be 10 years rather than six months before the disease was stemmed. According to the World Health Organization, Aids is the continent's most deadly infectious disease. It is estimated that thousands of people in Africa become infected with HIV every day, and that the continent is home to two-thirds of the global population of those infected with the virus.
Experts says the disease is the single biggest obstacle to economic development in Africa.
Dr Piot said it had taken five years for attitudes to Aids to change in Uganda, which was one of the first countries in Africa to be badly hit by the virus. Tribal chiefs and the elderly had helped change attitudes, he added. Ibrahim Samba, head of the World Health Organization regional office for Africa told the conference, which lasts until Thursday that progress had been made in the past 10 years, but many people in the continent were still unaware of the seriousness of the Aids crisis. John Caldwell, an Australian professor of demography, said most Africans knew the basic facts about Aids, but many refused to change their sexual habits. At the opening session of the conference, a declaration was issued promising to make Aids and HIV issues a priority in all national development programmes.