NAIROBI, Dec 1: The United Nations unveiled plans on Monday to rush life-saving anti-retroviral AIDS drugs to three million of the world’s poor in a 5.5 billion dollars emergency strategy to fight a disease now killing 8,000 a day.

The UN’s World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that six million people in poor countries need the anti-retroviral (ARV) treatment that many victims in the rich world now take for granted, but less than 300,000 actually receive it.

“HIV/AIDS has become the premier disease of mass destruction,” WHO Assistant Director-General Jack Chow said at the launch of a strategy on World AIDS Day aiming to get ARV treatment to half of the six million by the end of 2005.

“This year alone three million people have died of AIDS. These are people whose lives could have been saved through provision of ARVs,” he said.

The WHO announced last week that 40 million people around the world were infected with HIV, and that the global AIDS epidemic shows no signs of abating.

It says the aim of the new strategy is to ensure that all people living with AIDS, even in the poorest settings, have access to treatment.

It also hopes that better access to treatment will encourage those with HIV/AIDS to come forward, something which is difficult for many in countries where the stigma of having AIDS often condemns sufferers to social isolation.

“Experience in Brazil and Haiti has shown that where people can get treatment they have the courage to come forward for testing,” Mr Chow said.

“It is my desire that the three million goal is not a ceiling but a floor and that we start today to provide universal access.”

KEY TO TREATMENT:UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan says many political leaders still simply do not care enough to fight the disease, which has killed 28 million people since it was first reported among homosexuals in the United States in 1981.