The United Nations special envoy for AIDS in Africa, Stephen Lewis, blasted Group of Eight leaders for not keeping their AIDS fight funding promises, saying "the pavlovian betrayal of the South has already begun."
The Global Fund to fight AIDS, TB and malaria is short half a billion dollars this year and more than one billion next year, he said, and "at the moment there is no obvious way to close the shortfall."
"Everything in the battle against AIDS is put at risk by the behaviour of the G8," he said.
Mr Lewis also condemned South Africa's AIDS policies and its arrest of 44 demonstrators for staging a protest over Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang's response to the country's crippling AIDS epidemic, saying "the coercive apparatus of the state" had been wielded "against the most principled members of society."
"Between six and eight hundred people a day die of AIDS in South Africa. The government has a lot to atone for. I'm of the opinion that they can never achieve redemption," he said.
The Toronto AIDS conference was attended by 21,000 scientists, doctors, public health experts and campaigners from over 100 countries, a record in the 25-year history of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS).
Although the search for an AIDS vaccine remains elusive the conference also heard that HIV-thwarting vaginal gels, called microbicides, may start to become available from 2009 if safety and effectiveness trials go well.
The conference was also told that another area of promise was male circumcision. Two big trials are underway in Uganda and Kenya that seek to confirm the outcome of a study in South Africa which suggests circumcised men are 60-per cent less likelier to be infected by HIV than their uncircumcised counterparts.
The results of these studies are likely to be published in 2008, when the next conference will be held in Mexico.