Marking World AIDS Day 2009, the World Bank on Tuesday urged countries and their development partners to intensify efforts to prevent new HIV infections to curb the continuing spread of the disease, and reaffirmed its own commitment to fund effective HIV/AIDS prevention, care, and treatment programs in developing countries.

Via video, World Bank Group President Robert B. Zoellick applauded the considerable achievements by countries and development partners in expanding access to HIV prevention, care, and treatment, while also noting the enormous challenges that remain.

Preventing new infections, he said, remained vital to reach the Millennium Development Goal of halting and reversing the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

" Intensifying efforts to prevent new infections is essential if we are to ensure that AIDS treatment is sustainable. A barrier to all our efforts against this disease is the stigma and discrimination experienced by people with HIV. This has been reduced, but it is not gone by any measure," Zoellick said in opening remarks to a high-level World AIDS Day event.

Zoellick also reaffirmed the Bank's sustained commitment to funding effective HIV/AIDS programs, and added that an important factor that has hindered progress on HIV has been the lack of food security, because when people do not have enough food to eat, treatment is less effective.

Over the past three years, the Bank has committed almost US$1 billion through grants, loans, and credits to HIV programs.

According to a new study of HIV-infected adults in Haiti, supported by the Bank, poor nutrition, aggravated by rising food prices, is reducing the effectiveness of life-saving AIDS drugs in adults who are chronically hungry and suffer from weak immune systems as a result.

Reinforcing the links between nutrition and effective AIDS treatment, the new Haiti report shows that hunger further weakens the immune systems of HIV-infected adults and undermines the effectiveness of their life-saving AIDS treatment.

Dr. Bill Pape, who is Executive Director of Haiti's GHESKIO (the Haitian Group for the Study of Kaposi's Sarcoma and Opportunistic Infections) Centers and Professor of Medicine at Cornell University's Weill Medical College, said that the risk of developing AIDS and/or dying could increase by 36 percent in HIV-infected people with high levels of hunger and poor nutrition as compared to other infected adults with enough nutritious food.

The new study, part of a larger research program by Cornell University, the Weill Medical College of Cornell University, and Haiti's GHESKIO Centers, provides the first-ever clinical evidence linking hunger to immune dysfunction and lower numbers of white blood cells, showing the combined impact of poverty and hunger on people living with HIV.

Haiti, Afghanistan, and Somalia have the worst daily caloric deficit per person (460 kcal/day) in the world. With 56 percent of Haitians living on less than one dollar per day, many cannot afford to eat and malnutrition is widespread.

Pape said that low baseline weight is an independent predictor of mortality in adult AIDS patients receiving antiretroviral treatment. Studies from Haiti and other countries also show that anemia is strongly associated with rapid HIV disease progression and death.

Launched on December 1, 1988, the World AIDS Day is about increasing awareness, fighting prejudice and improving education. The World AIDS Day theme for 2009 is "Universal Access and Human Rights." World AIDS Day is important in reminding people that HIV has not gone away, and that there are many things still to be done.

According to UNAIDS estimates, there are now 33.4 million people living with HIV, including 2.1 million children. During 2008 some 2.7 million people became newly infected with the virus and an estimated 2 million people died from AIDS. Around half of all people who become infected with HIV do so before they are 25 and are killed by AIDS before they are 35.

The vast majority of people with HIV and AIDS live in lower- and middle-income countries. But HIV today is a threat to men, women and children on all continents around the world.

(Xinhua News Agency December 2, 2009)