In mid-1993 six United Nations organizations, including the WHO, began to seek agreement on forming a novel joint and cosponsored UN programme on HIV/AIDS.26
By this time it had been realised that HIV was also spreading rapidly in the Asia and Pacific regions, home to more than half the world's population, where more than 700,000 people were already believed to be infected.27
A video of Dr. Brettle talking in 1993 about combination therapy.
The drug 3TC was authorised by the FDA in the USA and the Federal Health Protection Branch in Canada, to be used in "compassionate" therapy in people who had not responded to other AIDS treatment or who are not eligible for clinical trials.28 Those patients who had developed a resistance to AZT were offered didanosine (ddI) and dideoxycytidine (ddC) - drugs that had been extensively studied. A number of trials were underway comparing the effectiveness of taking AZT on its own and in combination with ddI and ddC.29
Despite the years of litigation and number of newspaper accounts of the infection of haemophiliacs and transfusion recipients, no formal investigation of what had happened in Germany was undertaken until the 'scandal' of October 1993. In October, the failure of a small German blood supply company called UB Plasma to screen blood and plasma for HIV was made public. The company's misconduct was discovered by the Federal Health Office by chance, as a result of routine examination of positive HIV test results.30 The Federal Government also admitted that officials had covered up 373 cases of HIV-contaminated blood in the 1980s.31
On World AIDS Day, 1st December, Benetton in collaboration with ACT UP Paris placed a giant condom (22 metres high and 3.5 wide) on the obelisk in Place de la Concorde in Central Paris in an effort to waken the world to the reality of the disease. A symbolic monument to HIV prevention, it appeared on the covers of newspapers worldwide
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