BARCELONA, Spain -- Former President Clinton and former South African President Nelson Mandela called on world leaders to recognize that the AIDS epidemic is a threat to international peace and economic stability.

The pair gave the final addresses of the 14th International AIDS Conference -- the largest-ever gathering on the disease. The conference drew 15,000 participants from around the world.

"We cannot lose our war against AIDS and win our battle against poverty, promote stability, advance democracy and increase peace and prosperity," Mr. Clinton told a Barcelona audience that cheered wildly as he and Mr. Mandela embraced.

Mr. Mandela noted that AIDS is claiming more victims "than all wars and natural disasters ... AIDS is a war against humanity ... This is a war that requires the mobilization of entire populations."

Mr. Clinton said at a panel Thursday that conference participants were the real heroes in the fight against AIDS and that most of what officials like him have done "you've kind of dragged out of us over the course of 20 years." Mr. Clinton said he regretted not having done more about AIDS while president, citing his lack of support in 1988 for a needle-exchange program to prevent the spread of the virus among drug users. "I think I was wrong about that," he said. "I should have tried harder to do that."

Issues that dominated the weeklong gathering included the need to get drugs to more people, the plight of women in HIV-ravaged nations and a honing in on how much the efforts will cost over the next decade.

On the last day of the conference, doctors, international public health officials and activists delivered their report cards on the achievements of the world's fight against HIV. They agreed that more determination and more money must be devoted to the world-wide war against AIDS if the march of HIV across the globe is to be thwarted, experts said Friday.

The experts said rich nations need to donate $10 billion a year. Current spending stands at about $2.8 billion. As always, the call for more money to finance work in the developing world was a major focus.

In the closing address, Mr. Clinton called on governments of rich countries to "figure out what our share is" of the yearly $10 billion that the United Nations says is needed to finance global AIDS programs. He said the U.S. should increase its spending by nearly $2 billion, which would amount to "less than two months of the Afghan war, less than 3% of the requested increase of defense and homeland security budgets."

Germany Pledges Money

The German government pledged another $50 million to the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria on the last day of the conference.

But nobody wrote a fat check. Seth Berkley, president of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, called the Barcelona conference "a splash of cold water" on how the world is doing in the fight against AIDS. The next such gathering is set for Thailand in 2004.

Expectations that there would be widespread access to anti-AIDS drugs in poor countries were shattered by a U.N. report, released the week before the conference, saying only 30,000 people were taking the drugs in sub-Saharan Africa, Mr. Berkley said.

In the developing world as a whole, less than 1% of people infected with the AIDS virus are receiving drug treatment, according to a recent World Health Organization report.

African doctors said one of the issues not discussed at the conference was that in many cases, HIV patients resell their drugs to villagers to get money for food and that the buyers do not know how to take the medicines properly.

On the science side, favorable results with a new type of drug were good news for patients whose infections have become resistant to all current treatments -- offering lifesaving treatment for those who have run out of options. However, concerns were raised by a report of an American HIV patient who had become infected again with a similar strain of the virus, causing a superinfection -- untouched by all the drugs.

There were also new findings making it even more unlikely that it will ever be possible to eradicate the virus from the body once it has invaded.

No Cure on the Horizon

There is still no cure and no preventive vaccine on the horizon. "That makes the case for prevention stronger than ever," said Dr. Ronald Valdiserri, deputy HIV chief at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "We have to be careful not to let prevention be overshadowed by the significant treatment issues.

"We need to do both, but particularly given the fact that there is no vaccine or cure around the immediate corner, one of the messages is: Let's get behind the strategies that are known to be effective," he said.

New statistics revealed how the epidemic is evolving globally -- experts predicted increasing numbers of AIDS orphans, a rising proportion of new infections in young people and a shift toward a majority of infections occurring in young women.

"The sense that the epidemic has a woman's face is now everywhere felt and has been repeated time and time again by people at the conference," said Stephen Lewis, the U.N. secretary general's special envoy on HIV and AIDS in Africa. "In some ways it's the most dramatic breakthrough of the conference."

Copyright (c) 2002 Associated Press

Updated July 12, 2002 11:31 a.m. EDT