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French first lady's new role
Carla Bruni
Carla Bruni-Sarkozy embraces new role as AIDS ambassador
"Bruni-Sarkozy lost her brother, Virginio Bruni Tedeschi, to AIDS in 2006... Following his death, the Bruni family set up a foundation to promote AIDS awareness and education of the disease"
French first lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy has taken the opportunity to announce her new role as an AIDS ambassador on World AIDS Day, which today celebrates its twentieth anniversary.
The wife of the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy will be working with the Geneva-based Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. She told Elle Magazine: "I can put all of the media coverage directed toward me to the service of a useful cause,"
Bruni-Sarkozy lost her brother, Virginio Bruni Tedeschi, to AIDS in 2006. Aged just 46 when he died, Bruni Tedeschi was a successful photographer. Following his death, the Bruni family set up a foundation to promote AIDS awareness and education of the disease, but Carla Bruni-Sakovsky insisted that the new work she will do as ambassador would be "on a whole other level." She said:
"Because of my brother, of course I am very sensitive to the issue of AIDS… But this is a pandemic. We tend to forget, we are used to it. But look at the figures. It's staggering."
There are currently around 33 million people living with HIV and since 1981 more than 25 million people have died of AIDS. Most of these have been in Sub-Saharan Africa, which is something Bruni-Sarkozy wants to draw attention to - in particular mother-to-child transmission, something that has been virtually wiped out in Europe, but affects 30 per cent of newborns in Africa.
"What I would like to do, working with the global fund, is to communicate directly with mothers and their children. This is probably complicated... We have to find a way to talk to them and that is why it's important to be on the ground."
The fund's executive director Michel Kazatchkine spoke of his excitement at Bruni-Sarkozy involvement in the fund.
"This is a disease that she knows well and that profoundly outrages her. One thousand children are infected every day by the HIV virus and it would take so little to save them."
The Global Fund was set up in 2002 and has so far invested more than eight billion dollars to support national AIDS treatment programmes.
The Italian-born supermodel-turned singer Carla Bruni-Sarkozy married French president Nicolas Sarkozy in February 2008.
