The participants are to come from Burundi, Eritrea, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, southern Sudan, Somalia, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania and Zimbabwe.

The meeting comes a day before the opening of the 13th International Conference on AIDS and Sexually Transmited Infections (ICASA), to be held in Nairobi from September 21 to 26, which the youths are due to attend.

In many countries, 60 percent of new HIV infections are in the 16-24 age group, with girls accounting for more than two thirds of new infections among 15- to 19-year-old, UNICEF said.

"Alarmingly, the so-called "window of hope" is getting smaller and smaller, as surveys conducted in many countries with high HIV prevalence rates show that young boys and girls are already sexually active by the age of 15," the statement said.

UNICEF hopes the young people's presence at the conference will provide an opportunity to assess the realism of existing HIV/AIDS programmes, and show the need for greater youth involvement in elaborating a relevant and effective response to the pandemic.

A collection of young people's thoughts and reflections on HIV/AIDS, writen, drawn or embroidered, will be presented to the young girls and boys during the forum.

By Caren Bohan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Irish rock star Bono pressed President Bush on Tuesday to set aside more cash for AIDS initiatives but came away disappointed after a face-to-face talk with the president at the White House.

"We had a good old row," Bono said of his meeting with Bush. "What I just can't agree with him on is the numbers."

Congress is weighing a $2 billion spending request for next year that would provide the first installment for Bush's five-year, $15 billion plan to combat AIDS.

Bono, the lead singer of U2 who founded an advocacy group for issues affecting Africa, said the AIDS epidemic had reached crisis proportions, with millions of children in Africa orphaned by the deadly virus.

He urged a U.S. commitment of $3 billion for the fiscal year that begins in October -- an increase of $1 billion over the plan Bush has backed.

"I'm not here peddling a cause," Bono said at a news conference at the St. John's Episcopal Church across from the White House. "Seven thousand people dying a day is not a cause. It's an emergency."

Clad in his trademark blue sunglasses, Bono was flanked by three bishops of representing the Catholic, Episcopal and Evangelical Lutheran denominations as well as leaders of humanitarian programs and Agnes Nyamya, a Ugandan woman with HIV whom Bush met earlier this year during his visit to Africa.

Bush's AIDS initiative, unveiled in his State of the Union address in January, would provide anti-viral treatment to HIV people in Africa and the Caribbean who cannot afford it.

It would also help children who have lost one or both parents and would work toward prevention with programs aimed at sexual abstinence, education and promotion of condom use.

Bush has held back his support for the full $3 billion for 2004 because of a concern that a system is not yet in place to use the money effectively, White House officials have said.

"You need to make sure the infrastructure is in place for those resources to be spent," White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters.

He said spending would be ramped up in upcoming years to meet the $15 billion commitment.

Although Bono described himself as "depressed" at failing to bring Bush around to his point of view on funding, he had kind words for the president, saying he felt Bush was "sincere" about carrying out his promises on the AIDS initiatives.

Some activists have expressed outrage over the 2004 AIDS funding request, charging that it demonstrated that Bush was not as committed as he said he was to tackling the problem.

PARIS (AFP) - Experts from across Africa gather in Nairobi on Sunday to assess the continent's life-or-death struggle against AIDS, characterised by a new phase in which money and medications are at last joining the fight.

With luck, the six-day conference, ICASA, may mark the moment when the war began to turn: when campaigners found they were not just limited to dishing out condoms but could start handing out the drugs that have braked the pandemic in rich countries.

"The main challenge today has changed, to one of programme implementation," Michel de Groulard, a top official with the agency UNAIDS, said in an interview.

Two years ago, when the big forum was last held, Africa's AIDS crisis was an unremittingly dark tableau. Grim statistics jostled for media space with chronic shortages of funds and a pitiful lack of pharmaceutical molecules.

Since then, of course, the figures are even more terrifying.

Some 30 million people living south of the Sahara, around three-quarters of of the world's total, have AIDS or the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) which causes it, according to UNAIDS.

One adult African in 11 has HIV, a figure that rises to one in five in seven southern African countries and, despairingly, nearly 40 percent in Botswana. Last year alone, 2.2 million Africans died of the disease.

Just a few tens of thousands have access to the antiretroviral drugs that, for many in the wealthy west, have transformed AIDS from a death sentence to a manageable disease.

Hope, though, has finally come.

Money is at last beginning to flow in significant volumes, although it remains far short of the figure named by the UN, of 10.5 billion dollars per year from 2005, to make headway against the pandemic on a global scale.

The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, a new initiative to pool donors, recipients, NGOs and the private sector, has now begun operations.

It has already earmarked a billion dollars to the fight against AIDS -- enough to multiply sixfold the number of people receiving antiretroviral drugs in Africa and to support half a million of the continent's 11 million AIDS orphans.

Another big gun is US President George W. Bush's initiative, worth 15 billion dollars over five years, to help African and Caribbean countries in the fight against AIDS.

On the pharmaceutical front, African countries are at last getting access to cheap anti-retrovirals.

"Big pharma" has slashed the prices of many of these precious drugs. And last month, World Trade Organisation (WTO) members agreed that poor countries can import cheaper generic copies of patented medicines under a "compulsory licensing system" if they are unable to manufacture the drugs themselves.

The next task is grunt work.

Called "capacity-building," it is the vital business of setting up supply networks, storage bases, recruiting personnel and training, said Salim Abdool Karim, a professor at South Africa's University of Natal and co-organiser of the landmark 2000 AIDS Conference in Durban.

"We've reached the stage where we feel we can really do this now," he said in an interview.

Hurdles include ensuring the money flows cleanly and efficiently to where it is needed and developing grass-roots medical networks so that treatments are administered properly, thus lowering the risk of resistance, said Lucile Astel, in charge of AIDS programmes at the French Red Cross.

Within African countries themselves, there are big variations as to how they perform on AIDS.

The continent's brightest stars are Senegal and Uganda, where early action to combat discrimination and encourage safe sex has helped keep infection rates relatively low or stabilised them.

The consensus among campaigners is that the most dismal performer is South Africa, whose political class spent years in denial, even doubting the scientific evidence that AIDS is caused by a virus.

Activists hope for a breakthrough in fighting the epidemic by producing the life-prolonging drugs in Africa, where only a tiny minority can afford the imported versions.

Kenya has about 2.2 million people with HIV/AIDS but only 7,000 currently receive anti-retrovirals.

Currently, the cheapest course of imported treatment costs about $40 per month in Kenya, where much of the population of about 30 million live on less than a dollar a day.

"As soon as we get a go-ahead from the Kenyan government, maybe by next month, we will start making the drugs," Prakash Patel, managing director of Cosmos Pharmaceuticals, told Reuters.

Patel said the company would produce AIDS medicines with the brand names Neviriv, Lemurs, Lazidariv, Stariv and Zidocos, although he declined to say how much they would cost.

"They will be economical and affordable, at least better than whatever is being imported," he said.

Patel said his company would manufacture the drugs after the east African country approved a bill in June 2001 allowing for the import and manufacture of generics, which are cheaper copies of drugs developed by big pharmaceuticals firms.

The AIDS pandemic has killed 3.1 million people around the world and 42 million people were estimated to be living with HIV/AIDS at the end of 2002, 29.4 million of them in Africa.

The World Trade Organization last month agreed to let poorer nations without their own drugs industry set aside patent rights to import cheaper generic medicines to fight scourges such as AIDS.

NAIROBI (AFP) - Several delegates will miss an international AIDS conference to begin Sunday in Kenya because of security fears, the chairman of the meeting said.

"There have been allegations of insecurity in the country and some delegates from the United States have said they will not attend the conference because of that," the chair of the International Conference on AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Infections in Africa (ICASA) Dundu Owili told a news briefing in Nairobi.

"By last week, at least 10 American and five African delegates had confirmed that they will not attend," Owili said.

"They are US government-sponsored delegates and the US State Department has told us that they will not allow them to come."

Last Friday, Washington extended a warning of "high potential" for terrorist attacks targeting US citizens and interests throughout east Africa, particularly Kenya.

The State Department said it believed a "credible" threat of attacks existed, and advised those planning travel to east Africa to carefully review their plans.

Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network has claimed responsibility for two terrorist attacks on two American embassies in east Africa in 1998 and again for an attack on an Israeli-owned hotel and an Israeli jet in Kenya last November.

The conference is to bring together 8,000 local and international experts from Africa and the rest of the world to review major advances in addressing HIV/AIDS and STD pandemics in Africa from socio-economic, cultural, political and scientific standpoints.

Owili said the scientist, experts, social and political leaders and communities will share experiences and updates on the responses to the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

Issues of political commitments on scaling-up the use of anti-retroviral drugs will be high on the agenda.

African First Ladies will take part in a charity run on the eve of the conference to celebrate the strength of African women in the fight against HIV/AIDS.

Compared with many African states, Madagascar has escaped lightly: along with Mali, Mauritius and Senegal, relatively few people in the island nation are infected by HIV, or the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS.

But figures released shortly before the 13th international conference on HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted disease in Africa (ICASA) opens in Nairobi on Sunday show a worrying rise in infection rates.

Provisional results of the screening of 9,548 pregnant women in July and August, disclosed to AFP, show an infection rate of about 1 percent.

According to Dr Bruno Rakoto, director general of the anti-AIDS unit at the health ministry, the results can be extrapolated to the population at large.

As Madagascar has a population of 16 million that would give a figure of 160,000 HIV-positive people, with a peak of 1.4 percent in the north and northeast of the island.

A previous figure put the infection rate at 0.3 percent.

"In 1990, South Africa was also at 1 percent. Today, 25 percent of the population is affected," said Barison Andriamahefazasy, the local World Health Organisation AIDS counsellor.

"These results are serious since, above 1 percent, the country enters a generalized phase of propagation of AIDS.

"The most infected group are the young, between 25 and 29 years old. They also are the group that spreads the infection the most," he said

"Still, it is not too late because a country like Senegal also had a 1 percent rate 10 years ago and it has managed to contain the spread, thanks in particular to a message of prevention directed at the young."

AIDS was declared a "national cause" in December by President Marc Ravalomanana. A national anti-AIDS committee was set up and a series of campaigns initiated in the media.

One black spot is the high rate of sexually tramsitted disease (STD) in Madagascar: at 14 percent it is one of the highest in the world.

Causes include the widespread practices of polygamy, promiscuity and sexual tourism.

Poverty and ignorance make things worse and free screening centres are not always operational.

"With these results the race against the clock has begun," Rakoto said.

By Zandile Nkuta

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - South Africa's umbrella trade union group Thursday piled pressure on the government to launch a nationwide rollout of AIDS drugs in public hospitals, saying a delay of six months would kill thousands.

"Our government needs to act as a matter of urgency. They need to implement the decision quickly, not in six months' time," said Willy Madisha, president of the 1.8 million-member Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU).

South Africa has the biggest HIV and AIDS caseload in the world, with 5.3 million of its 44 million people infected. AIDS activists estimate the disease kills about 600 people a day.

President Thabo Mbeki's government last month bowed to pressure from local and international AIDS activists and planned to start distributing anti-retroviral drugs by the end of the year but COSATU said that would be too late.

Madisha spoke at the end of COSATU's congress in Midrand, north of Johannesburg. COSATU also resolved to press on with its anti-privatization campaign, a major source of tensions with the ruling African National Congress (ANC) ahead of polls next year.

COSATU opposes Mbeki's market-led policies, which it blames for rising unemployment, but said it would still back the ANC in elections widely expected in April next year.

In a resolution issued at the end of its four-day national congress, COSATU said it wanted to see South Africa's rand currency weaken to between nine and 10 to the dollar, from 7.33 now, to create jobs and boost sluggish economic growth.

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It said it also wanted the constitutional mandate of the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) to be reviewed, making employment an aim of monetary policy. The SARB's current mandate is to deliver price stability.

COSATU demanded the government reverse its policy of privatizing state assets on the grounds that privatization threatens thousands of jobs in a country where unemployment already stands at around 30 percent.

The government has picked three firms for restructuring and partial sale by 2004 -- transport group Transnet, telecommunications utility Telkom and power supplier Eskom.

COSATU, a key ANC ally, helped the ANC win landslide victories in the first all-race elections that ended apartheid in 1994 and in elections in 1999.

The ANC is widely expected to win next year's election, the main question being whether it will retain a two-thirds majority in parliament.

COSATU also called on the government and public corporations to invest at least 45 billion rand in infrastructure to boost short- and medium-term local demand and stimulate growth.

It also said it wanted greater participation in government and to be consulted more on policy matters.

JOHANNESBURG (AFP) - AIDS campaigners say that the billions of dollars pledged to fight the killer disease in Africa are not enough to subdue the pandemic, and that a landmark deal last month on access to generic drugs falls far short of the needs of the devastated continent.

Activists, speaking ahead of Africa's 13th International Conference on HIV/AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Diseases which starts in Nairobi on Sunday, welcomed the agreement at the World Trade Organisation in Geneva late last month to make it easier for poor countries to buy cheap versions of brand-name medicines, but said major problems remained.

More than three million people -- 600,000 of them children -- died of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa last year, according to UN figures, and the future looks bleak, with life expectancy tumbling and men and women in their 30s and 40s being wiped out, leaving frail grandparents to care for the children.

The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria expects to disburse close to five billion dollars during 2002-04, and US President George W. Bush has pledged 15 billion dollars to fight AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean over the next five years.

But Jonathan Berger, a South African researcher at the AIDS Law Project, based at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, said the Geneva deal still left poor importing countries, which could not make their own drugs, at the mercy of richer exporting countries.

"It still requires that compulsory licences must be issued in both importing and exporting countries. The problem is that even when a country which desperately needs the drugs issues a compulsory licence to import them, it is up to the exporting country to do the same," he said.

"In many countries with a capability to manufacture generic drugs and export them, their patent laws may not provide for export of products under compulsory licenses, or may not allow for such licenses to be issued, or the political will may not exist."

Rwanda's secretary of state in charge of the prevention of AIDS, Innocent Nyaruhirira, said access to anti-retroviral drugs would draw people to clinics.

"When there is no motivation, people are not interested in being tested or going for counselling," he noted.

Currently, anti-AIDS treatment in Rwanda costs around 35 dollars per month, against 700 dollars in 1999.

"But the cost remains too high," Nyaruhirira said, underscoring the poverty of a continent where many people exist on less than a dollar a day, and government health budgets are tight.

In Botswana, the continent's worst-hit country, where some 38 percent of adults are infected with either HIV or AIDS, and life expectancy has plunged from 67 to 42, Bryad Ryder, spokesman for the African Comprehensive HIV/AIDS Partnership, said: "The prices of drugs have come down in the past and they will continue to come down. This is good news for everybody. We are finally seeing the response of the international community, and what we need now is funding from donor countries."

But Kenya Coalition for Access to Essential Medicines (KCAEM) spokeswoman Beryl Leach said the Geneva agreement would make it difficult for developing nations to promote their own pharmaceutical industries and manufacture generic drugs.

"The deal was a bad one, forced on developing countries by the United States, European Union and other powerful WTO members," Leach said, adding that agreement was "unworkable and impractical at its best."

"Those who are expecting drugs to start flowing will be in for a rude shock and disappointment" she warned.

In Zimbabwe, where 2,500 people are reported to be dying of AIDS every week, health professionals and AIDS activists said the Geneva deal was welcome, but might not be effective if other factors affecting poor countries were not addressed, such as shortages of health workers, and provision of clean water and electricity.

"There is a lot involved. It just does not end at the cost of anti-retroviral drugs," said Sara Page, the health promotions manager for the Southern Africa HIV/AIDS Information Dissemination Service.

The pandemic, she said, "has a huge impact on families, and for businesses. We might have one person who goes to three funerals per week."

ACCRA (Reuters) - A Dutchman has been arrested for knowingly infecting a Ghanaian woman with the virus that causes AIDS, police in the West African country said on Friday.

The man, 53, will appear in court next Wednesday and could face up to 12 years in prison if found guilty of intentionally causing harm, police said. He has not yet had a chance to plead.

Police said the man had unprotected sex with a 38-year-old woman who has since tested positive for the HIV virus.

"He didn't inform her that he was HIV positive until last month. He's been having sex with her since October last year," said a spokeswoman of the Women and Juveniles Unit, a special outfit of the Ghana police.

Ghana's HIV infection rate, estimated at about three percent of the adult population in 2001, is lower than in neighboring West African countries.

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The top U.S. government AIDS investigator called on Friday for an international network to share information in developing an AIDS vaccine, including governments, industry and non-profit vaccine groups.

The deadly virus has proven so much harder to fight than any other disease that it will require unprecedented global cooperation to overcome, said Dr. Anthony Fauci.

"What we would like to do is create an atmosphere of cooperation and collaboration," Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), told a news conference.

"I don't see a new structure," added Fauci, whose briefing at the AIDS Vaccine 2003 meeting in New York was carried by telephone.

"We are talking about a broad strategic plan so that when other people in other countries, industry, get involved we do it in a way that is organized, rather than multiple groups going about their independent ways."

Two dozen different vaccines are being tested in 27 trials involving human volunteers around the world, according to the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI). Scores more are being tested in lab dishes and in animals.

Fauci said the NIAID, which is itself testing several vaccines and also funding other researchers, could help organize the effort, which he dubbed the Partnership for AIDS Vaccine Evaluation.

Fauci said he was already in discussions with several pharmaceutical companies, which he declined to name, and with groups such as IAVI.

"It's open to all parties," he said.

Fauci did not give details of what pharmaceutical companies would be asked to do and said some already share a great deal of their information.

The 1,000 or so researchers at the conference are hearing about hundreds of different experimental efforts to develop a vaccine against HIV, which infects more than 40 million people around the world.

HIV, which causes acquired immune deficiency syndrome, has killed an estimated 28 million people since the epidemic began in the early 1980s.

Drug cocktails can keep HIV patients healthy but the vast majority of patients have no access to drugs. Experts agree that a vaccine is the only hope for controlling AIDS.

Because the virus attacks immune cells and can lurk undetected in the body for decades, it is much harder to fight than any other infectious disease.

The only AIDS vaccine to get through the whole course of human trials, VaxGen's AIDSVax, failed to protect high-risk volunteers against HIV infection.

By MORT ROSENBLUM, AP Special Correspondent

GENEVA - As AIDS runs rampant in Africa and threatens calamity for India, China and Russia, epidemiologists say that even the promise of billions in rescue money cannot curb the disease as long as social and political barriers hamper the fight.

"Coping mechanisms are collapsing," Richard Feachem, head of the Global Fund set up by leaders of the industrialized democracies, said in an interview. After two decades, he said, the pandemic is spinning further out of control.

Peter Piot, director of UNAIDS, the U.N. agency fighting the disease, agreed that denial and lack of urgency on the part of some governments blunted international action.

"In Asia and eastern Europe, the political leadership isn't there," he said. At recent meetings in India, Piot said, "I heard great speeches, but as for action, zero."

The U.N. General Assembly gathers for a special one-day session on AIDS Monday, brightened by the prospect of infusions of money, primarily President Bush's promised $15 billion aid package. But the consensus among dozens of specialists interviewed in Europe and America is that the money won't help much unless countries come out of denial and work together.

They say China and India have millions more HIV-positive cases than officials acknowledge. Russia is largely a mystery because so many infected drug users and prostitutes have not been tested. Officials in Moscow say 250,000 people are registered as HIV-positive, but public health doctors are convinced the real figure is well over a million.

About 65 million people have contracted the HIV virus over 20 years, and 25 million of them are already dead, U.N. estimates say. In 2002, 3.1 million died, and 5 million more were infected.

The experts praise President Bush for giving new priority to the crisis, but say that the money promised over five years for 14 countries is a fraction of what is needed and that overlapping programs with conflicting policies could muffle its impact.

Stigma and social taboos still thwart effective action, and AIDS money is lost to duplication, corruption and mismanagement.

"I don't think there is malevolence here but rather a genuine confusion, a sort of land scramble," says David Miller, an expert with the World Health Organization. "Everyone is competing for the same small amount of funding,"

"You've got every country learning their own lessons," Miller said. "Nothing is clear. It's like gazing at a plate of spaghetti."

AIDS, say the specialists, must be seen as not just a medical problem but as a scourge that could affect the world economy by depleting work forces, disrupting farming cycles, killing off civil servants and business executives. In sub-Saharan Africa, a third of adults are infected. A single highway from Uganda through Kenya and Rwanda is seen as one of the major routes along which drivers and prostitutes carried the disease to crisis levels. In Zambia the air force once had to be grounded because so many pilots fell sick.

Epidemiologists fear a similar impact on Asia and eastern Europe unless sweeping measures are taken quickly to raise awareness, dispel stigmas and encourage people to get tested for HIV.

"We are still way, way short. We need a massive upgrade of care, with access to counseling and testing," said Michel Lavollay, a respected French AIDS specialist. "Now, 95 percent of infected people don't know they are infected."

Effective research has produced drugs to slow AIDS, and these now can be supplied at $300 a year per patient, said the Global Fund's Feachem, but many governments lack either the funds or the will to supply them.

"On an effectively large scale, we have done nothing," Feachem said. "We haven't achieved any of the changes that would have made a difference."

Speaking in epidemiological terms, he put it starkly: "If in 1982 when we became aware of the virus we had decided to do nothing in order to observe its course without intervention, the world would be roughly where it is today."

Piot, the UNAIDS chief, said he disagrees, arguing that substantial progress has been made. But, he said, "We should have invested far more in development, security and political issues."

Now, Piot worries that too much focus on drugs will again allow governments to neglect other essential components of the anti-AIDS fight, such as counseling, prevention and care.

Richard Holbrooke, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who now champions the fight against AIDS, said by telephone from New York that private business has done only 5 percent of what it should.

"We've only scratched the surface on prevention and treatment," he said, adding that productivity and growth are at risk in much of the world.

By supplying infected employees with drugs and other care, businesses can protect their own work forces and so bolster the economies on which they depend, he said.

Holbrooke cited Thailand as a rare success story. Government officials helped AIDS workers deliver the message, from kids' cartoons to a publicity blitz for safe sex and community care.

Many specialists fault turf wars for many of today's problems.

Feachem, a British epidemiologist from the University of California at San Francisco, runs the Global Fund, set up by the Group of 8 summit in 2001 to raise money independent of the United Nations and individual governments.

But the worldwide campaign is coordinated elsewhere in Geneva by UNAIDS, a newer version of the Global Program on AIDS, or GPA, pioneered by an American virologist, Jonathan Mann, in the 1980s.

Mann and his high-profile team made some headway applying prevention, treatment and counseling, mobilizing families and communities to increase AIDS awareness and chipping away at prejudices that caused embittered victims to seek revenge by infecting others.

But Mann quit, accusing his superior, World Health Organization director Hiroshi Nakajima, of thwarting programs by caving in to pressure from national health ministers who elected him. Mann died in a plane crash in 1998.

Nakajima was later replaced, and GPA was reshaped into UNAIDS, run by Piot, an eminent Dutch specialist.

But its staff of 250 operates on a yearly budget of only $95 million, while the Global Fund now has $4.7 billion to spend over the next five years fighting AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria and seeks an annual "cruising speed" budget of $7 billion.

Officials at both UNAIDS and the Global Fund say cooperation has been limited.

"You've got the money in one agency, and the operational people in another," says Lavollay, one of Mann's original team and now with the U.N. International Labor Organization. "It's a five-minute drive away, but it's an unbridgeable gap."

"We are still not collectively capable of seeing the kind of world AIDS is going to create," he said.

Feachem said even the new billions pledged amount to "peanuts" compared to what is needed. But the real challenge, he said, is to persuade national leaders to confront reality.

"How can it be that in country after country, people well informed about what has happened elsewhere cling to denial," he said, "and then, after denial, they turn to minimalization?"

Kathleen Cravero, Piot's deputy, said the Global Fund had lost time by creating parallel mechanisms. She characterized their joint efforts as effective, if less than perfect.

"We can't afford to be sulking in the corner," she said. "We have an epidemic on our hands; deal with it."

She welcomed Bush's AIDS initiative, though uncertain where it would go under the direction of former Eli Lilly chief Randy Tobias, whom she described as "completely new on the scene."

"We'll have to make a major effort to win him over, beg to get in the door, and we'll do it," she said. "It's important. Our responsibility is to bring Tobias into the big picture."

Noerine Kaleeba, who founded the successful Ugandan self-help group, TASO, now organizes community action programs at UNAIDS. Kaleeba, who lost her husband and dozens of close relatives to AIDS, briefed Bush during his trip to Uganda.

She said she was encouraged by Bush's interest, but she agrees with the others that lessons of the 1980s have yet to sink in.

"People still say Africans can't use drugs because they don't have watches — we have roosters," she said. In fact, though few Africans have access to the drugs, of those who do, she said 85 percent take them regularly, compared to 70 percent in the developed world.

"I'm still an optimist," Kaleeba said, saying that past mistakes and inaction were no reason to despair. "It is never too late to take action. But the question is, how much has this already cost us?"

NAIROBI (AFP) - Health workers from across Africa and Britain will gather for a three-day conference in the Kenyan capital to discuss the role played by older people in caring for orphans infected with HIV/AIDS, organisers said.

"The number of AIDS orphans is rising drastically as the pandemic continues to claim millions of young adults all over Africa," said HelpAge International (HI), one of two organisations behind the meeting.

"Most of these children end up under the care of grandparents living under extreme poverty that compromises their ability to provide adequately for them and this burden will increase as the (numbers of) orphans increase," it added.

The charity said the meeting would try to identify ways to increase support to elderly people and others caring for HIV/AIDS sufferers, and was set to launch a report on the issue, entitled "Forgotten families".

"The report highlights that older people caring for orphans and vulnerable children in countries severely affected by AIDS face hardship and isolation and are themselves in urgent need of support," said the organisation, a global network of charities that support the elderly.

The conference will be attended by representatives from organisations that work with older people, orphans and other vulnerable children, government representatives and donor agencies from southern and eastern Africa and Britain.

The conference comes ahead of the 13th International Conference on AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Diseases, to be held in Nairobi from September 21 to 26.

Recent World Bank figures show that in Africa and Latin America, more than one in five orphaned children are living with their grandparents.