More responsibility called for as stars address conference

Film stars and community leaders rubbed shoulders at the world's biggest ever AIDS conference, calling for people around the world to take responsibility for the fight against the virus.

Academy Award winning actor Richard Gere told the 16th International AIDS Conference in Toronto that the media including everyone from television executives to Hollywood and Bollywood superstars must battle the disease by using their power to reach into hearts and homes.

Gere, a longtime AIDS activist and founder and director of Healing the Divide and the Heroes Project in India, joined media giants from India, the Caribbean, South Africa and Russia on Monday (local time) to promote the concept of planting AIDS awareness campaigns in television programming.

He said he was inspired by screen legend Rock Hudson, who died of AIDS in 1985, and Hudson's good friend Elizabeth Taylor, one of the first big stars to get heavily involved in anti-AIDS campaigns.

Two years ago Gere helped launch India's Heroes Project, which works with television executives to produce public service announcements about HIV/AIDS, using Indian icons such as Bollywood biggie Amitabh Bachchan and cricket star Rahul Dravid.

Under the project soap operas have also featured HIV-positive characters and documentaries and talk shows to address a subject that is still taboo in many Indian homes.

Meanwhile Julian Bond, the Rev Jesse Jackson and other powerful African-American leaders broke another taboo, calling on the black community to accept responsibility for ending the devastation of AIDS, which has claimed more than 200,000 of their own since the pandemic began.

In a first for African-American political leaders not just black AIDS activists or health care workers the delegation attending the 16th International AIDS Conference blamed themselves for a lack of will and pledged to do more.

"The story of AIDS in America is mostly one of a failure to lead and nowhere is this truer than in our black communities," said Bond, chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

According to the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention, African-Americans account for half of all new cases of HIV in the US.

"Because of poverty, ignorance and prejudice, AIDS has been allowed to stalk and kill black America like a serial killer," said Jackson, chairman of campaign group the Rainbow PUSH Coalition. Jackson could not be at the conference, but issued a statement of support with the other leaders.

The African-American leaders signed a pledge to draft a five-year plan to reduce HIV rates in the black community.

High hopes at conference

Away from the angry rhetoric of the community leaders, the light scent of marijuana wafted among exhibits at the conference, as activists took advantage of Canada's comparatively pot-friendly policies to make a pitch for the drug as a pain-killer.

"This is the first time that an exhibit of this kind has been at the AIDS conference," said Hilary Black, spokeswoman for the Medical Marijuana Information Resource Centre, which along with the Canadian AIDS Society sponsored the display.

Researchers claim marijuana can ease some types of severe and chronic pain, as well as symptoms like nausea, with fewer side effects than many prescription remedies.

Source: China Daily