UNAIDS: The First 10 Years

UNAIDS The First 10 Years90Mandela said: “We are grateful to a province that has the courage to declare that it has a highrate of infection. We admire the brave men, women and children who are with us today to say:‘We are the human face of AIDS – we are breaking the silence!’ If we are to succeed then allof us must follow these examples and take responsibility for dealing with this problem. …”.Later that month, Piot met with Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee of India, who expressedconcern about the hidden nature of the epidemic. The seventh UNAIDS PCB meeting wasbeing held in New Delhi in December 1998. The Indian Prime Minister had made a nationaladdress specifically on AIDS, had personally raised the issue in Parliament and challenged allstate ministers to take on HIV/AIDS in their state-level plans.In February 1999, AIDS was again on the agenda at the World Economic Forum at Davos,Switzerland. Both Piot and MTV President Bill Roedy called on business leaders to focuson young people. Roedy said: “Modern marketing techniques used for selling goods andservices to the youth market are most effective in reaching out to youth concerning AIDS.MTV International is using such techniques to design special programming on AIDS issuestargeting the young people who make up [our] main audience”.The partnership with MTV – a TV network with a huge global reach especially to the young– started in 1997 when Winter invited Roedy to the launch in Brussels of that year’s WorldAIDS Campaign on children. MTV had already produced some major programming aroundHIV, weaving story lines and messages about prevention and against stigma into scripts.Mandela remindedthe audience thatbehind everystatistic hid ahuman beingand that politicalcommitment wasessential for aneffective response toAIDS.The great advantage for UNAIDS is that through MTV it can reach out to a young audiencearound the world in a credible way – which the UN alone could never do. “We use UNAIDS asthe experts for everything [on the epidemic]”, explained Roedy. “We fact check everythingwith them, we’re in almost daily contact”.Tackling the crisis in Africa: the InternationalPartnership against AIDS in AfricaThe statistics were worsening in many African countries. In May 1999, the annual WorldHealth Report from WHO had stated that AIDS was the number one overall cause of deathin Africa.‘… if political and religious leaders had responded with effective public health programmesmuch earlier’, wrote Altman, ‘they might have prevented hundreds of thousands, if notmillions, of deaths. Some leaders simply denied the scientific evidence that HIV wasbeing transmitted in their countries. Others mistakenly believed they had more pressingproblems to address’ 21 .21Altman (1999).