JOHANNESBURG - About 15,000 people joined former president Nelson Mandela at a star-studded concert in Johannesburg yesterday to raise money for his AIDS charity.
"A few days ago, the United Nations estimated that more than 33 million people around the world are living with HIV," Mandela said. "This lower figure suggests that prevention programs have been successful in bringing down infection rates.
"That trend is encouraging, but it is still alarming that for every person that receives treatment, there are four others that are newly infected," he told the crowd on World AIDS Day.
The concert included performances by Peter Gabriel, Annie Lennox, Corinne Bailey Rae, Ludacris, and Razorlight. Its proceeds will go toward HIV/AIDS programs throughout southern Africa, the epicenter of the worldwide AIDS epidemic.
The event was called the 46664 World Aids Day Concert. Mandela's charitable organization, 46664, took its name from his former prison number.
South Africa, which has one of the world's worst AIDS epidemics, has made headway in fighting the HIV virus, but condom use is still insufficient, government leaders said yesterday.
One in nine South Africans is infected with HIV, but President Thabo Mbeki's government has been criticized for not doing enough to halt the spread of the disease despite the heavy economic and human toll.
Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang cited a study showing a decline in HIV among pregnant women - a benchmark used to measure infection in the broader population.
"The report of the 2006 antenatal survey results released this year showed a decrease in the prevalence of HIV amongst pregnant women who use public health facilities," she was quoted as saying by news agency SAPA.
Mbeki, who has been criticized for not taking the lead in the charge against AIDS, called on South Africans to use condoms.
"What is really of importance is that we must, all of us, take these messages very seriously, particularly our young people," Mbeki said on SABC public radio.
Events also were held elsewhere in Africa to mark World AIDS Day, an annual event first organized 20 years ago to help raise awareness of the disease and money to help fight it.
In Niger, about 3,000 people, mostly women and young people, marched through the capital Niamey to demand more measures to help AIDS victims. In the small West African state of Benin, President Thomas Boni Yayi headed a march to show solidarity for AIDS victims.
The South African government relented to pressure and launched a plan to provide antiretroviral drugs in 2003, after Mbeki had questioned the safety of the medication and expressed doubts about widely accepted science on the link between HIV and AIDS.
But activists have said the program is moving far too slowly, causing several hundred deaths each day. Some 700,000 HIV patients are without treatment, especially bad in rural areas where clinics are saturated with a backlog of cases.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who took on South Africa's apartheid government as the country's first black bishop and received the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize, said the battle was far from won.
"We face a monumental crisis, one that was horribly exacerbated when we wasted valuable time in futile academic discussions and debates about the causes of AIDS," he said in a speech to diplomats Friday.
"We were fiddling whilst our Rome was burning," Tutu said. "People who would have been alive today, died needlessly."
In the United States, health advocates and HIV/AIDS activists held a protest outside the White House on Friday calling for increased funding and an end to abstinence-only sex education requirements for US-funded programs abroad.
President Bush urged Congress to approve an additional $30 billion for the global fight against AIDS over the next five years. He also announced on Friday that he would visit Africa early next year to highlight the needs.
David Bryden of the Global AIDS Alliance said many prevention programs around the world are beginning to make an impact, with fewer infections and more people receiving life-saving treatment. But he said "there's still a long way to go," noting that the virus kills 6,000 people a day and infects 7,000 more.
