The Two Paths.

Summary of keynote address by Peter Piot, UNAIDS Executive Director,
deliverd at the Opening Ceremony, 5 October 2001.

It is a very great pleasure for me to be with you tonight and I want to particularly congratulate the conference co chairs Rob, and Robin and Dennis, and all those who have worked with you to create this wonderful Conference. At the historic UN General Assembly Special Session on AIDS in June in New York I said that the world faced two paths. Two possible futures. One path: the current situation: an epidemic that we are fighting - but is gradually defeating us. Where tens of millions are dying, and where a hundred million more may become infected and die in the future. If we continue as we are, each year losing a little more ground, this is where we will stand. A place of pain and sorrow, of unimaginable loss and of collective shame: that together we failed to protect the vulnerable, the sick, and the orphaned.

But the other path is one of collective responsibility, guided by science not ideology, freed from the shackles of shame and fear. This is the path where we finally match the scale of the epidemic with the scale of our response. Where the fight against AIDS is truly embraced in every field of social action - by politicians, in the churches, mosques and temples, by unions and the women's movement, by business alongside government. This is the path where we abandon the fruitless debate between prevention versus care - and do as the best local responses to the epidemic have always done - realise that our common humanity demands both - as was explicitly recognised in the UNGASS declaration of commitment.

This is the path where: people living with HIV are in the centre of decision making, where young people have learnt about sex and how to protect themselves, where infants are not born with HIV, where treatments are accessible and not a badge of elite-status, where condoms - male and female - are accessible to all, and where microbicides and a vaccine multiply our prevention options.

In no region of the world are these two paths more clearly laid out than in Asia and the Pacific. For all the region's diversity, here their destinies are intertwined. From tiny populations dotted in the middle of oceans, to vast nations numbering their people in the billions, the lessons are the same, the two paths point to different futures. We can see the two paths clearly, and there is no room for hesitation in choosing the right one. But we have also learnt that the epidemic does change - people change. Japanese youth today have a lot more unprotected sex and partner change than they did ten years ago. Drug injection was unusual a decade ago, but has exploded in many places - Indonesia for example. People move across the region in their millions, and with them HIV risks become mobile. The epidemic is not static - and so our responses can never be static. Let us stop the nonsense of trying to determine a "natural limit" to the epidemic in Asia and the Pacific.