BBC News Online: World: Africa

Possible decrease in African AIDS infections

The United Nations top AIDS official says that this year fewer people than last year may become infected in Africa with the virus, HIV, which causes the disease.

Speaking at an international conference on the AIDS crisis in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, the executive director of the United Nations programme on AIDS UNAIDS, Dr Peter Piot, said the number of newly infected people -- nearly thirty-four million -- was still totally unacceptable.

He also said that it was too early to present the decline in new HIV infections in Africa as a turning point; he said the trend had to be sustained. At the conference's opening session on Sunday, the executive director of the Economic Commission for Africa, the ECA, Kingsley Amoako, described the fight against AIDS as a battle for Africa's survival.

The United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan is expected to give a keynote address sometime during the week.

From the newsroom of the BBC World Service