|PIC1|Christian Aid will be participating in an event in Parliament Square on 29 November ahead of World AIDS Day on 1 December. The event is bbeing organised by the Stop AIDS Campaign.

Parliament Square will be transformed with a giant Aids awareness ribbon made out of 8000 red carnations in recognition of the 8000 people who die each day from Aids-related illnesses.

The event will open at 10am and will begin with speeches by Douglas Alexander, Secretary of State for International Development (DfID), Siphiwe Hlophe, founder of Swaziland Positive Living, and Daleep Mukarjee, Director of Christian Aid.

Christian Aid has encouraged as many people as possible to attend the event and to speak to their own MPs on the day to "increase the pressure on the DfID to produce a bold AIDS strategy".

The Stop AIDS Campaign has called for a strategy to tackle HIV and Aids over the next three years. The strategy includes a spending plan of £2.5 billion that would ensure that the UK paid what the campaign said was "its fair share of resources needed to achieve Universal Access by 2010".