GEORGE STRAIT: The organizers of this year’s International AIDS Conference say that the theme was the importance of political leadership. Eight current and former heads of state or governments gathered to emphasize the point.
JORGE SAMPAIO: To begin with, I don’t think of myself as a champion of anything. I would prefer the word “militant” in relation to this cause. [applause]
MALE SPEAKER #1: We have wasted a lot of time in the past. Now we have to make up for it. We must act immediately. Not only in those countries with overwhelming rates of infection, but also in those, mainly the most vulnerable ones, in which the epidemic is beginning to grow at lightning speed.
WILLIAM CLINTON: Not a single politician anywhere in the world has been defeated. Not one are talking honestly and frankly to his or her people about the dimensions of this problem and what needs to be done about it.
MR. ALI HASSAN: The other night, from early on, that the virus was predominantly sexually transmitted. If this fact became more widely known, it quickly spread, panic and horror as well as great confusion for our people. The horror and confusion would mean, in effect, that all of us were at risk, as we are all sexually active. As leaders, we are role models in everything. The way we speak or talk, the way we walk, the way we dress and sometimes the way we seem to like all this life things around us, including our attitude toward sexual conduct. A leader who speaks positively about condoms would influence many people to use condoms. It is, therefore, a commitment to education and sometimes sacrifice so that other people use them in a dignified light. Thank you.
MALE SPEAKER #2: Thank you very much indeed, Mr. President. You have brought it out in the open and I have condoms for every panelist here. [applause]
WILLIAM CLINTON: You know the Secretary General of the United Nations has estimated that 10 billion dollars a year for several years would be required to actually turn the tide. What should we do?
MALE SPEAKER #3: Countries like India, Brazil, Ireland, have proved that it is possible to market drugs at a much lesser cost than we have originally enrolled. Therefore, competition may have helped, but that is not so important to me as a swift [Unintelligible]. And collective wise of all of us, I think only way is that this drug must be socially priced and not on the marketplace.
REPORTER: Today during the conference, organizers held session on youth and today they indicated the path of all new HIV infection occur in people 15 to 24. Eight thousand young people under the age of 25 are infected every day. MTV held a mini-town meeting with young people asking question of an expert panel and former President Clinton.
WILLIAM CLINTON: I cannot emphasis enough that [Unintelligible]
REPORTER: The basic science, which came from the conference, had the most discouraging data [Unintelligible]. A vaccine is still, maybe, years away and current medications has severe limitations.
SPEAKER #4: And that even if you have treatments that stop every new cell from being infected from the moment therapy is started, the cells that are already infected will persist, essentially for life, and will make the infection intrinsically incurable with anti-retroviral therapy alone. You will need some way to specifically target this reservoir and the problem is that that is going to be very difficult because of the nature of the reservoir.
SPEAKER #5: Because when you do bring the level of virus down, people may lead healthier lives and longer lives. But, on the other hand, since you cannot eradicate the virus, that gives you even more reason to push for prevention together with treatment.
REPORTER: Nevertheless, the delegates were told there were many reasons to be optimistic.
SANDY THURMAN: We know what works. We now have the blueprint for action with identified goals and benchmarks for charting our progress. In fact, a report from this conference reveals that we could save nearly 30 million lives by simply applying what we already know. Clearly we have the knowledge, we have hope and we have plenty of opportunity. What we need now are the collective will and the resources to put our vision into action. As Gandhi said, “We must become the change that we want to see”.
REPORTER: Researchers from John Hopkins unveiled the multi-media program designed to reach youth in Zambia that they say may work in other resource poor countries.
MALE SPEAKER #6: As part of the campaign, we looked at abstinence messages. Mostly trying to popularize abstinence. At that time, when we said it, most young people say that they did not think abstinence was viewed as something cool or something hip to actually come out and say, “I’m abstinent.” So, what we needed to do was to try and give abstinence an image for coolness.
MALE SPEAKER #7: Today’s discussion demonstrates how a program designed by you, for you, using mass media can dramatically reduce pre-marital sex among single women from 41 percent in the early ‘90s to 14 percent in the late ‘90s. In addition to this delay of sexual debut, other participants in this program used condoms in the last sexual act nearly twice as often as those who were not participating in this program. Researches tended to be older and tended to be women. We have three speakers today, and they will describe how this campaign achieved such dramatic results.
JORGE SAMPIAO: Perhaps the strongest message to come out of this conference to the whole world is that leadership makes a difference. Maybe I should rather say, make the difference.