A new momentum has appeared to provide funding for the fight against Aids and cheap treatment for its victims around the world, but "we are falling behind," heads of UN agencies said yesterday.

Peter Piot, the executive director of Unaids, declared at a meeting in Zambia with ministers of health, education and finance from six southern African countries that "we are definitely in the middle of a political momentum around the world" to step up the campaign.

That included "momentum of hope" generated by cheap access to antiretroviral drugs and "financial momentum" resulting from money being supplied by major donors, he told the conference in the resort town of Livingstone, on the Victoria Falls.

The challenge, now, he said, was "how can we make this money work?" Unesco Director General Koichiro Matsuura said the aim of the meeting was "to find better ways of working together".

But he warned: "Whatever else it may be, Aids is a development disaster. Aids is wiping out decades of investment in education and human development".

"Unfortunately, we have to recognise that we are falling behind," Matsuura said.

"Since there is no vaccine and no cure, and scaled-up treatments are only now becoming available, prevention remains vital if the spread of the epidemic is to be curtailed. But we have not been able to address the issue of prevention in a way that takes hold".

Matsuura said the problems of AIDS were long-standing, "but there is now a new urgency".

Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa, who opened the meeting between the UN chiefs from six agencies and the ministers of health, education and finance from Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe, said his government was committed to providing "all the political will that is necessary".

But he pointed out that 70% of people in southern Africa live below the poverty line, making it difficult for governments to raise funds to fight the disease, which has hit southern Africa harder than anywhere else in the world.

At the end of 2003, the UN estimates, 26,6-million people in countries south of the Sahara desert were HIV-positive out of a world total of 65-million.

That includes prevalence rates approaching 40% of adults in some countries and 60 percent in those countries' worst-hit regions.

"The epidemic (in southern and eastern Africa) has reached a stage where death is visibly and viscerally felt," said a background paper prepared for the conference.

"We stand at a critical crossroads with a devastating triple-threat of HIV/Aids, weakened capacity for governance, and hunger on the one hand, and an enormous opportunity to channel national, regional and international resources and capacity to reverse the epidemic on the other".

It said the epdemic was "hollowing out" governments' capacity to deliver services, with vacancies in the civil service at critical levels.

Another background paper warned that "top-down" education would not work, saying: "there is probably no issue that depends as much on being embedded in the cultural realities of place and community as teaching and learning about HIV/Aids". – Sapa-AFP.