CAPE TOWN, Nov 29: Bono, The Corrs, Beyonce Knowles and other international stars answered Nelson Mandela’s call to help fight the scourge of AIDS on Saturday, putting on a musical extravaganza broadcast across the world on the Internet.

Nelson Mandela, 85, joined 40,000 fans of all races who packed into the Green Point stadium in Cape Town under a cloudless sky for the fund-raising concert.

“AIDS has ceased to be something to be ashamed of. It’s just another medical condition,” pop singer Bob Geldof, who organized the hugely successful Live Aid concert in London in the 1980s to help Ethiopian famine victims, told the crowd.

The disease has hit South Africa harder than any other country, with more than five million of its 45 million people infected, and is seen corroding an already fragile social fabric as it leaves an army of orphans in its wake.

The concert was part of Mr Mandela’s “46664” campaign — named after his prison number when he was jailed during South Africa’s apartheid era — to mobilize governments to declare HIV/AIDS a global emergency and to get millions infected with the disease on life-prolonging anti-retrovirals.—Reuters