billion-dollar, five-year U.S. programme launched in 2003 had brought treatment and medicine to 350,000 sub-Saharan Africans, In a statement seen as a criticism of Bush's focus on abstinence, the European Union had stressed a day earlier that AIDS prevention had to use all measures available including condoms, health care and sex education. "We, the European Union, firmly believe that to be successful, HIV prevention must utilise all approaches known to be effective, not implementing one or a few selective actions in isolation," said the statement released in London. In India with 5.1 million HIV-infected people, the worst-affected country after South Africa, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh urged people to shed traditional inhibitions and talk more openly about safe sex to halt the spread of the disease. Speaking at a Youth Convention on HIV Awareness, he said India's AIDS policy would be reformed as it had not yielded satisfactory results. A 1-billion-dollar campaign, financed with international aid, would include rural areas, where 59 per cent of HIV-positive Indians lived. In Nigeria, where 3.8 million people live with HIV/AIDS, President Olusegun Obasanjo led over 5,000 people on a seven-kilometre walk in Abuja. The country also had to solve the challenge of caring for its 1.4 million AIDS orphans, Obasanjo said in an address after the walk. In Zambia, where an estimated 16.5 per cent of adults aged 16 to 49 are infected, the government reiterated it would roll out free AIDS drugs in the public health sector, and planned to have 100,000 infected people on anti-retroviral drug therapy by the end of 2006. HIV activists in Moscow presented the winner of a "Miss Positive" beauty contest aimed at highlighting the rampant spread of HIV in Russia, where 318,000 are registered as HIV-positive and 1 to 1.5 million people, most of them under the age of 30, are believed to be infected. Svetlana Izambayeva, 24, from the Cheboksary region, 600 kilometres east of Moscow, won the contest supported by the Moscow- based AIDS Foundation East-West. "The fight against HIV/AIDS should not be a fight against people living with HIV," she said. In countries less effected by AIDS, politicians and campaigners noted that prevention was vital in the fight against AIDS. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, more than 1.3 million citizens received mobile phone text messages and 70,000 email alerts about AIDS, sent by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) as part of its campaign "Unite for children, Unite against AIDS" campaign. --SP 2341 Local Time 2041 GMT
