infected people in Eastern Europe and Central Asia than 10 years ago, the report said. Some 1.7 million are infected in Latin America. Despite the bleak picture, the U.N. said significant progress has been made to meet the demand for drugs. Some 700,000 AIDS patients have received anti-retroviral therapies by the end of 2004 under programmes administered by UN-AIDS programmes, the World Health Organization and other programmes by the United States and World Bank. Yet these patients are only 12 per cent of the 6 million HIV- infected people in low- and middle-income countries. Richard Feachem, executive director of Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, appealed to governments to sustain funding because those receiving drugs would need them for years to come. The fund, created in 2000, has been disbursing billions of dollars to purchase drugs and support AIDS education in 130 low- and middle- income countries. The fund will need 10.4 billion dollars through 2007, Feachem said. --SP 0017 Local Time 2117 GMT
