Today, on the 20th World AIDS Day, we are again beseeching leadership to ‘Stop AIDS and keep the promise.’ We asked them to do so last year, and we are asking them to do so again. Although much has been done since the last World AIDS Day, AIDS clearly has not stopped. Stopping AIDS is the ultimate measure of progress in the AIDS response, but we must remember that it is not the only one.

Speaking at the Saddleback Church Global AIDS Summit, UNAIDS Executive Director Dr. Peter Piot paid tribute to the contribution religious leaders have made to the global AIDS response, and the key role religious groups have played in providing HIV treatment, care and support in some of the remotest parts of the world.

Today is a fitting time to acknowledge and celebrate the leadership of thousands of women and girls all over the world who, on a daily basis, take on the challenges of the AIDS epidemic with courage and conviction.

The World AIDS Campaign has selected “leadership” as the 2007 World AIDS Day theme highlighting the need for innovative and visionary leadership in response to the epidemic. It calls on all of us to renew our commitment at the individual, family, community, national and international level to support empowering leadership on AIDS.

The theme of this World AIDS Day is leadership. Without it, we will never get ahead of the epidemic.

Today, millions of people around the globe are marking the 20th World AIDS Day. For some, this may be the only day in the year they think about AIDS. For many, however, AIDS is part of daily life.

As communities gather to mark World AIDS Day, and governments take stock of the progress towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) is urging that more attention be paid to the fundamental connection between hunger and health, which lies at the heart of the pandemic.

New data show global HIV prevalence—the percentage of people living with HIV—has levelled off and that the number of new infections has fallen, in part as a result of the impact of HIV programmes. However, in 2007 33.2 million [30.6 – 36.1 million] people were estimated to be living with HIV, 2.5 million [1.8 – 4.1 million] people became newly infected and 2.1 million [1.9 – 2.4 million] people died of AIDS.

On 7 November 2007 at the HIV Vaccine Trials Network (HVTN) meeting in Seattle, NIH, HVTN and Merck released updated results based on post hoc analysis of data from a large-scale STEP trial with a Merck candidate vaccine (MRK-Ad5).

United Nations agencies and programs are committed to taking all the necessary measures to intensify Central America’s response to the HIV epidemic. This announcement was made by the Regional Directors for Latin America and the Caribbean of UNAIDS and UNICEF, participating in the 5th Central American Congress on HIV – CONCASIDA 2007.