HIV-AIDS continues to be the biggest single obstacle to reducing poverty and to attaining the Millennium development goals. To fight it, so many things must work together, including strong leadership, allocation of adequate resources, co-ordination of planning and promoting a best practice approach. Monday next is World AIDS Day and we intend to highlight the issue as we did last year. We are organising a major conference on this issue during our Presidency. This conference will relate the problems caused by HIV-AIDS in central and eastern Europe and central Asia. The head of UNAIDS has spoken about the need to urgently address the problem in that part of the world. As Europeans, it is important that we do this.