DR. COLBY: We’ll move on to our next distinguished speaker now please, Dr. Peter Piot. He is an MD/PhD, Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations and Executive Director of the Joint United Nation’s Program on HIV/AIDS. Thank you for being here, Dr. Piot.

DR. PETER PIOT: Thank you, Dr. Colby, and good morning everybody. Following Ron’s very detailed and very elegant and interesting presentation, I can only say that the trends that he’s described for the U.S. we find also in Western Europe, in other Western countries, particularly the increase in incidents of Syphilis. There have been outbreaks of Syphilis in about every major European city along the same lines, but it hasn’t been followed yet by an increase in HIV. And I think it’s extremely important to understand what’s going on there.

I’m not going to give a PowerPoint presentation. I trust that everybody has received the report that we launched last week--early last week. It’s available in English, French, Spanish and Russian, and it includes detailed statistics and trends for about every single country in the world with a few exceptions. There are some white spots on the map still. And this is the map that gives you the trends, not only the current situation, but also the trends by major continents, and here are the white spots.

What I’ll do is, I’ll give an overview very briefly of where we are in the world, but particularly try to highlight three major issues that I believe are of importance for this conference and for the global response to AIDS. The way I look at this conference is, and particularly since the one two years ago in Durbin, is that this conference comes at the time when the global response is moving into a new phase. Durbin was, I think, the beginning of the “wakeup call,” and since then a lot of things have happened.

We’re moving into an area where--an era where AIDS has become a top global issue in politics and that’s where it should be. When I got into this job six years ago when we started with UNAIDS, my first objective was to, as we say, to put AIDS on the political agenda. Because I had become convinced that in order to greatly expand prevention efforts, treatment efforts, just applying what we know that works, not even talking about new technologies that we desperately need, that that would only be possible if there would be the political will to back all these efforts. And that will was not there six years ago.

It started appearing in many countries over the last two years. And this top-level political commitment is not only visible from the speeches by presidents, prime ministers, church leaders, business leaders, but also by some very clearly measurable indicators. The most striking one is that there has been a six-fold increase in money that is going to aids activities in developing countries since ’98. And the most impressive increase of that has occurred the last two years since the Durbin Conference.