Aids orphans: the price of complacency

Aids could wipe-out the entire population of Africa, Nigeria's president said on day two of the United Nations special conference on the disease.

The country's president, Olusegun Obasanjo, said that the "future of our continent is bleak" and warned that the world must wake up to the scale of the problem.

"The prospect of extinction of the entire population of a continent looms larger and larger," Obasanjo warned on Tuesday.

His comments came as Clare Short, the international development secretary, attacked foreign governments for failing to face up to the Aids epidemic.

As ministers from across the world met in New York, Short warned Muslim and Catholic religious leaders against ignoring high risk groups.

"Let me say to those countries and organisations that do not wish to mention these high-risk groups, if you fail to face up to the need to take action to protect such groups, you will sentence your countries to higher rates of infection. If we fail to work together to remove the denial, the stigmatisation and the discrimination, we will fail to prevent the spread," said Short.

With African leaders calling for third world debt to be cancelled to allow governments in the region to focus on combating HIV, Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, said the world had to unite to fight Aids. He called for a new global fund to be set up to pay for the fightback.

The UN estimates that between $7 billion and $10 billion is needed every year to combat the Aids epidemic.

Day one of the conference was overshadowed by a row over calls for the exclusion of the San Franscisco-based International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission. Muslim delegations, led by Egypt, had called on the group to be excluded from the conference over a row about naming vulnerable groups.

Aids has so far claimed 22 million lives, left 10 million children orphaned and infects 15,000 people a day. There are 36 million people across the world living with HIV/Aids, the UN estimates.