The six-day, 15-million-dollar International AIDS Conference (IAC), themed "Access for All", will bring together up to 20,000 delegates including world leaders, scientists, activists and people living with the disease, they said.

"This is going to be the benchmark conference that other people will measure future AIDS conferences by," IAC senior advisor Gustaaf Wolvaardt told reporters Monday.

"The bottom line that most of the monetary restrictions in terms of society providing access to anti-retroviral (drugs) have been addressed and now the issue that will come up is the political will to roll these programs out."

Wolvaardt said the meeting which will run from July 11 to 16 is also expected to spotlight Thailand's success at combating HIV, including an unabashed 1990s campaign to promote condom usage.

"What we have seen in Thailand is the appropriate steps to control the epidemic while it is still at a preventable, manageable size instead of chasing a runaway train," he said.

"If you compare where Thailand was in 1990 compared to a lot of south African countries, there were exactly the same rates... 15 years later Thailand has one million people HIV positive while the same size countries in Africa now have 15-20 million people."

Organisers said that while past meetings had boosted awareness and fundraising for Africa's AIDS epidemic, Asia's plight remained little known around the world.

"Asia is home to more than one-third of the world's population and harbors more than one-fourth of the world's new infections," they said in a statement.

The Bangkok meeting is being organised by the United Nations and several non-government organisations, led by the International AIDS Society and the Thai health ministry.

The world HIV-AIDS conferences are held every two years and are rotated between developing and developed nations.

The last was held in Barcelona, but it was the 2000 meet in South Africa which organisers credit with breakthroughs in fundraising and forcing pharmaceutical firms to allow the production of cheap generic anti-retroviral drugs.

TERRA.WIRE