In his message on World AIDS Day, United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan, noting the prodigious resources available to fight the spread of the disease, called on the international community to intensify its efforts to meet the millennium development goal of beginning to reverse the epidemic by 2015.

"Halting the spread of AIDS is not only a millennium development goal in itself; it is a prerequisite for reaching most of the others," he said, referring to the development targets to reduce extreme poverty and a range of other ills set by world leaders at the Millennium Summit in 2000.

Noting that the resources and the institutional machinery was available for such an intensified effort, Annan said that there was currently about $8 billion available for AIDS efforts in developing countries annually, compared to $300 million a decade ago.

In addition, the national AIDS response in some 40 countries is led by heads of state or government themselves, or their deputies and AIDS is a familiar item for discussion in the General Assembly and the Security Council.

With signs of progress in almost every region of the world and new commitments made at the World Summit in September, Annan said, "We have real evidence that AIDS is a problem with a solution."

"So, this is a time to concentrate our minds. It is a time to recognise that although our response so far has succeeded in some of the particulars; it has yet to match the epidemic in scale. It is a time to admit that if we are to reach the millennium development goal of halting and beginning to reverse the spread of AIDS by 2015, then we must do far, far more," he concluded.

Among others marking World AIDS Day, Miloon Kothari and Paul Hunt from the Commission on Human rights emphasised that women and girls bear the brunt of the global AIDS epidemic.

"Gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls are fundamental elements in the reduction of their vulnerability to HIV/AIDS and the reversal of the pandemic," they said.

The plight of the 11 million AIDS orphans in Africa was highlighted by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The agency said it has set up 34 schools targeting 1,000 such children in Kenya, Mozambique, Namibia and Zambia, for both general education and to fill the gap in agricultural knowledge left by their parents' deaths.