US president Barack Obama today vowed to boost US efforts to fight Aids with a new target of providing treatment to six million people worldwide by 2013, up from an earlier goal of four million.
At a celebrity-studded World Aids Day event on Thursday, Mr Obama also challenged other nations to boost their commitments to fund treatment and called on China to "step up" as a major donor in the effort to expand access to Aids drugs.
"We can beat this disease. We can win this fight. We just have to keep at it, today, tomorrow, and every day until we get to zero," Mr Obama said at the forum, where he credited his Republican predecessor, George W. Bush, for his efforts to combat Aids and HIV.
"As we go forward, we need to keep refining our strategy so that we're saving as many lives as possible. We need to listen when the scientific community focuses on prevention," Mr Obama said.
Mr Bush, who sought to make the fight against Aids and HIV a signature issue of his presidency, spoke by satellite to the Washington event sponsored by the One campaign, an organisation dedicated to fighting poverty and preventable disease.
In his remarks via satellite from Tanzania, Mr Bush said he understood that many nations, including the United States, were struggling with their budgets. But he said wealthy nations had an obligation to make the fight against Aids a priority.
"We're a blessed nation in the United States of America, and I believe we are required to support effective programs that save lives," Mr Bush said.
Advocacy groups welcomed the new treatment target from the United States, the largest global Aids donor by country, at a time when they are suffering from a funding crunch. Annual funding for HIV and Aids programmes fell to $15 billion (€11 billion) last year, well below the $22 billion to $24 billion United Nations agencies say is needed by 2015.
New HIV infections fell to 2.7 million in 2010, down from 3.1 million in 2001, while the total number of people getting life-saving Aids drugs rose to 6.65 million in 2010 from just 400,000 in 2003, according to recent data.
But that is still a minority of the 34 million people around the world who had the human immunodeficiency virus in 2010. Studies have also shown that suppressing the virus through treatment reduces HIV's spread to patients' partners by as much as 96 per cent.
As part of a goal to achieve "an Aids-free generation," Mr Obama said the United States aimed to provide anti-retroviral drugs to more than 1.5 million HIV-positive pregnant women worldwide by 2013.
He announced a $50 million increase in spending on HIV and Aids treatment in the United States, where only 28 percent of the 1.2 million Americans living with the infection have it under control, according to health officials.
Reuters