Meeting the UN's goal of distributing antiretroviral drugs to three million people living with AIDS by the end of 2005 will cost more than five billion dollars, United Nations health officials said here Wednesday.

That amount is more than the total spent worldwide on fighting AIDS in 2003, they said.

The "Three by Five" target was spelt out by the UN's World Health Organisation (WHO) on Monday, when the agency declared AIDS a "global health emergency." UNAIDS Executive Director Peter Piot, whose agency coordinates the fight against the worldwide campaign, told a press conference that "it will take five billion (dollars) by 2005 just to treat the three million."

This figure is incorporated in existing UNAIDS estimates that the world would have to spend 10.7 billion dollars in low- and middle-income countries in 2005 to combat the pandemic and 14.9 billion in 2007, he said.

However, the five-billion dollar bill does not include building the vital infrastructure -- training personnel, buying equipment, setting up storage and distribution networks -- that is needed to administer the drugs, Piot said.

"We estimate that this year, worldwide 4.7 billion dollars will have been spent on AIDS programmes, but that's a mixture of prevention and treatment, and it's particularly the treatment component that needs to go up," Piot said.

"Overall, we are only halfway," he said.

Piot was speaking at the International Conference on AIDS and Sexually-Transmitted Infections in Africa (ICASA), a forum held every two years, that deals specifically with African problems of the AIDS crisis.

The focus of the "Three by Five" campaign will be on sub-Saharan Africa, which has three-quarters of the world's tally of around 40 million people who are infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) or who have AIDS.

According to UN figures, only about one percent of Africans requiring antiretroviral drugs currently have access to them, although this proportion is expected to increase as prices fall further - Sapa-AFP