Eighty-five percent of HIV-positive people in Democratic Republic of Congo have no access to AIDS treatment, while international funding has been cut, according to Doctors Without Borders.

The Belgian wing of Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF-B) said in a statement released Wednesday that "the conditions of access to care of people living with HIV/AIDS are catastrophic."

The medical charity was launching a campaign called "HIV/AIDS in DR Congo: the ignored emergency," and it highlighted the 85 percent of HIV-positive people in the vast country with no access to the antiretroviral (ARV) care that enables them to live longer.

Out of almost 68 million Congolese, "more than a million people are HIV-positive and the number of patients who should have benefited from ARV treatment in 2011 is estimated at 350,000," the statement said.

"However, only 44,000 patients are actually undergoing treatment, which represents a total ARV coverage of 14 percent," compared with 49 percent for sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, MSF-B said.

"Only one percent of HIV-positive pregnant women" receive the medication intended to prevent the transmission of the virus to their baby, the European non-governmental organisation said.

For people undergoing treatment, the official "pledge of free care is not respected", Anja de Weggheleire, an MSF-B medical coordinator, told a Kinshasa press conference.

Consultations, cases of hospitalisation and laboratory exams are all charged to the patient and his family, who can rarely pay in a country where two-thirds of the population lives on $1.25 (almost one euro) per day.

The situation is likely to worsen because the main international donors are cutting their assistance, including The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which has provided 75 percent of the finance to tackle AIDS in the DR Congo.

MSF-B in November last year criticised the "suppression of funding by the Global Fund for 2011," which it said was a first in 10 years. Developed nations responded by blaming the international financial crisis.

Without "emergency" funds as of early in 1012, "we will have no money via the Global Fund until 2014," warned Thierry Dethier, an analyst and spokesman for MSF-B.

The medical charity has also urged the Congolese government swiftly to make available the seven percent of its health budget devoted to fighting AIDS.