A major UN meeting on AIDS strategy on Friday fell short of concrete financial commitments but recognised the growing spread of the disease among women and their right to protect themselves.
Friday's session, the last day of a three-day meeting, brought together heads of state, prime ministers and health officials from 151 countries on how to care for 40 million infected people over the next decade.
Some 25 million people have died of AIDS since 1981 and 8,000 die each day of the disease, although the rate of new cases has slowed. Women in Africa have surpassed men in contracting the disease.
The final declaration, many activists said, was more positive than they had predicted. Muslim countries, including Iraq, Egypt and Pakistan, at one point had resisted commitments on the rights of women or girls.
Still, some 70 groups among the 800 attending denounced the declaration as "pathetically weak" on financing and rights for girls under 18, many of them in forced marriages.
"I know that none of you got all that you wanted in this declaration," UN General Assembly President Jan Eliasson said in closing the session. But he said thanks to the advocacy groups, "the draft got stronger - not weaker." Although he declaration is non-binding, it serves as a basis for programs from governments, private groups and business.
The document says $23 billion will be needed annually by 2010 to fight AIDS, more than double the $8.3 billion spent in 2005. Nations agreed to search for additional resources to ensure universal access to treatment by 2010. But delegations did not commit themselves to a timetable for raising the funds as they did in 2001 when the financial target was met.
The United States led those objecting to financial goals, although Washington, the largest spender on AIDS in the developing world, has set its own targets.
Squeamishness over sex was evident this year as in 2001, with Islamic groups and conservative Roman Catholic countries using the term "vulnerable groups" rather than referring to prostitutes, homosexuals and drug addicts.
"Leadership means finding ways to reach out to all groups - whether young people, sex workers, injecting drug users or men who have sex with men," UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said several times this week.
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