Excerpts of remarks by journalist Huntly Collins* on Dec. 4, 2005 at the media briefing of the International Conference on AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Infections in Africa (ICASA) in Abuja, Nigeria.

"I am honored to speak to you today about the role of the media in combating HIV/AIDS.

For me personally, AIDS has been the biggest story of my lifetime.

Every day, more than [6000] people become infected with HIV. And though we now have effective medicines to combat the virus, there still is no cure and we do not yet have a vaccine to prevent infection.

For those of us who began covering AIDS in the early days of the epidemic, it hard to believe that next year will mark a quarter century since the first cases of AIDS were reported to public health officials in the United States. Today, more than 25 million people around the globe are living with HIV and 23 million of them are in Africa.

You, more than I, know the devastating toll that AIDS has taken from Cape Town to Cairo, from Lagos to Lusaka.

Here, on the continent where human life began, a tiny virus is now killing 2.4 million people a year. That's more than 7,000 people a day - almost 300 every hour - five every minute.

Between now and the end of this conference on Thursday, more than 1,500 people across Africa will have died of HIV.

You know them. They are your countrymen and countrywomen. They are your farmers and factory workers. They are your teachers and principals. They are your entertainers and athletes. They are your friends and neighbors. They are your parents and grandparents, your aunties and cousins, your sons and daughters. They are your co-workers and, perhaps, they are you.

A few years ago when I worked as a reporting and writing coach at The Johannesburg Star, I saw first hand the toll that AIDS was taking among journalists themselves. Each week, a new death notice for a colleague would go up on the company bulletin board.  The newspaper's health insurance fund was going broke because of the high cost of anti-retroviral drugs. And many of my South African colleagues spent their Saturdays attending funerals.

Still, the word "AIDS" was not spoken. That was something that happened to the people we wrote about, not to ourselves.

Though many in the media would like to hide behind the mask of professional objectivity, the fact is that the media play a pivotal role in shaping society's response to the epidemic.

At the beginning of the epidemic in the United States, uninformed reporting about HIV helped to foster prejudice toward the already marginalized groups that appeared to be most at risk gays, injecting drug users and Haitian immigrants.

On the other hand, accurate and comprehensive reporting about AIDS in Africa in the late 1990s helped to galvanize the international community behind a program to make anti-retroviral drugs available to the world's most impoverished people.

Today, media coverage of AIDS like the pandemic itself -- is at a crossroads.

On the one hand, there is important progress to report. Slowly but surely, antiretroviral drugs have been introduced in Africa and they are saving lives. Where drugs have been made available, larger numbers of people have come forward to be tested for HIV. And around the continent, most notably in Botswana, public-private partnerships have begun to create much-needed improvements in public health infrastructure that is a pre-requisite for a sustained response to the pandemic.

On the other hand, however, the virus still has the upper hand and it is important that the media take stock of the challenges ahead.

In the majority of the hardest hit countries south of the Sahara, the number of people infected with HIV is growing, not declining. Despite steps in the right direction, antiretroviral drugs are still getting to fewer than one in six Africans who need them. The World Health Organization's much touted 3 x 5 program has failed to reach its goal, and contributions by rich countries to the multilateral Global Fund to Combat HIV, TB and Malaria have fallen far short of what is needed.

While prevention (what one UNICEF official calls "the education vaccine") holds out the most immediate hope for stopping the epidemic, the Bush administration's push for abstinence and opposition to condoms for the general population has undermined the ability of poor countries to deliver on the promise of the $15 billion PEPFAR program effectively the largest single public health project in U.S. history.

In brief, we may be losing to AIDS more slowly than we had in the past, but we are still losing.

This is a complex story to report, and even more so with limited resources, state-controlled media and corruption in the upper echelons of the media establishment.

I will never forget, for instance, the first training workshop I facilitated for journalists from Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. Several of the reporters in a group of some two dozen said the biggest problem they faced was having to pay money for good stories. Come again? Yes, they replied, money. If you did a good story, the reporters said, you had to pay your editor. That's because your editor assumed that you got paid by someone else to do the story in the first place!

I appreciate the many challenges that you face. At the same time, AIDS in Africa is too important a story to let such barriers stand in your way.

As Nelson Mandela reminded black South Africans: "do not make yourselves small." You, as African journalists, have a vital role to play in helping to stop the spread of a lethal virus that has now infected more than 40 million people and threatens to infect more than 60 million by 2010.

As journalists, you can break the silence and stigma that still shroud HIV infection by telling the stories with permission, of course -- of real people infected with HIV who have names and faces and feelings just like everybody else.

You can illustrate the promise of antiretroviral therapy by profiling the comeback of those who have managed to get on the drugs.

As journalists, you can also debunk the junk science that has gained credence at various points in the epidemic, including the lunatic notion that HIV is not the cause of AIDS.

Although most journalists have never looked at a clear sky without seeing clouds, there are important success stories out there that need to be told because they can be models for others.

What about a company that is successfully offering counseling, testing and effective treatment for its workers? Or a rural health clinic that has successfully involved family members and friends in antiretroviral adherence programs? Or a courageous NGO that manages to distribute condoms despite the constraints imposed by its American government funder.

Good news is often just as important as bad news.

At the same time, you as journalists also have an important watchdog role, particularly at a time when billions of dollars are flowing into the effort to combat HIV in Africa.

As the Watergate scandal taught us in the United States, follow the money!

How are the PEPFAR funds in your country being spent? Are they being spent? What are your country's target goals for reducing the prevalence of HIV? To what extent are they being met or not? What about the growing number of NGOs in the AIDS field? Are they doing their jobs, or have they become local elites who are more interested in perpetuating themselves than in serving those who are infected or at risk of infection?

These are the kind of issues and the kind of questions that cry out for the tough-minded reporting that only journalists can do.  Finally, you as journalists have an extremely important role to play in helping the public understand that the AIDS epidemic is not just about a biological phenomenon, but also about underlying social forces.

To cover AIDS is also to cover poverty, gender discrimination, violence, homophobia, racism and other social ills.  AIDS exposes all of the fault lines of modern society. By making the connection between these underlying issues and infection with HIV, you as journalists can help lay the framework for rational social policy that will go a long way toward stopping the AIDS epidemic.

To be sure, the road ahead for you as journalists will require not just skill and commitment, but also courage.

Government officials may not like what you report. Media owners, more interested in profit than truth, may not give you the time and space to cover the stories that need to be covered. The public, which doesn't like to see itself in a bad light, may pillory you.

Take strength from the heroes who have gone before you from people like Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian writer who, in 1986, became the first African to win the Nobel Prize for literature.  As you know, Soyinka has been imprisoned, tortured, forced into exile and banned at various times over the past 30 years. Still, he has refused to be silenced.

"Social commitment," Soyinka writes, "is a citizen's commitment and embraces equally the carpenter, the mason, the barber, the farmer, the customs officer, not forgetting the critic. I accept a general citizens' commitment, which only happens to express itself through art and words."  And so it is with journalists. We have a citizens' commitment to tell the truth about AIDS and efforts to combat it.

The words we write and the pictures we take make a difference. They can either perpetuate misinformation and prejudice, or they can elucidate the facts and foster understanding and action.

The future of us all - not just you in Africa - depends on the job you do. Good luck and God speed."

(The named author alone is responsible for the views expressed in this article)