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BARCELONA, Spain, July 7 (AFP) - Funding to help poor and middle-income countries combat the worsening AIDS crisis needs to at least triple, to 10 billion dollars a year, the United Nations said Sunday.

Speaking before the launch of the world's biggest-ever AIDS conference, UNAIDS Executive Director Peter Piot declared "the world has now awakened to the epidemic and what it takes to bring it under control."

Since the previous forum in Durban, South Africa, in 2000, funding for prevention and treatment programmes for AIDS and the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in developing countries had increased sixfold to around 2.8 billion dollars today, Piot said.

But he warned this was still nowhere near what was needed -- a 50 percent annual increase in the commitment for every year until 2005.

HIV "is now really getting off the ground" in China and the former Soviet Union -- and the latest dismal figures showed that the epidemic has still not peaked in southern Africa, the worst-hit region.

"The evidence from a historical perspective is that the epidemic is still in its earliest phase," he told a press briefing.

"Ten billion dollars are necessary to have the kind of results that Uganda has had," he said.

He referred to the East African country that has braked the spread of HIV through intensive safe-sex programmes, nationwide diagnostics and also treatment with anti-retroviral drugs to prevent babies from being infected while in the womb.

Piot said there had been some "watershed" funding improvements in the last couple of years, notably the creation of the UN's Global Fund for AIDS and other major diseases and a World Bank fund that earmarked soft-loans for AIDS-ravaged countries.

Even so, "we are still having an enormous shortfall," he said.

In Latin America and the countries of the former Soviet Union, most of the required future funds could be expected to come from the local government, but in sub-Saharan Africa, the bulk of the money would still have to come from outside.

To make up the shortfall, rich countries would have to dig deeper into their pockets, as it was "enlightened self-interest" that they help prevent a poor country from collapse.

He also called for changes in the way that wealthy nations allocated development aid, which is often based on economic parameters, such as per-capita gross domestic product (GDP), rather than on the AIDS burden.

One country that fell through the cracks in this way was Botswana, where the percentage of adults with HIV has risen to 39 percent from 36 percent in the past two years.

UNAIDS -- the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS -- is co-organiser of the Barcelona conference, along with the International AIDS Society.

Press officials said Sunday that around 15,000 doctors, researchers and activists would attend the six-day meeting, a record.

UNAIDS last week estimated that 20 million people have already died of AIDS and another 40 million, 70 percent of them in sub-Saharan Africa, have the virus. - Nampa-AFP

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