A senior U.N. official lamented on Tuesday that the world could donate billions of dollars in aid to victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami without doing the same for Africans dying of AIDS.

“I don’t begrudge a penny to Southeast Asia, but what does it say about the world that we can tolerate the slow and unnecessary death of millions, whose lives would be rescued with treatment?” said Stephen Lewis, the U.N. special envoy for AIDS in Africa.

“Without the slightest invidious intent, it is important to recall that there are today, now, at this very moment, six million people dying of AIDS, 4,100,000 of them in Africa,” Lewis told a news conference on his recent visits to Malawi and Tanzania.

A little over three weeks after a massive wave slammed into Indian Ocean coastlines from Thailand to Somalia, the death toll from the tsunami has soared to 165,493, with tens of thousands more still missing.

But around the world, an estimated 37.8 million people are infected with HIV, including 25 million in sub-Saharan Africa alone.

Five million people are infected and 3 million die every year, according to U.N. estimates.

Lewis said he hoped the relief campaign for tsunami victims would mark a turning point in the global response to other crises.

Governments, relief groups, corporations, international agencies and individuals have given or pledged more than $6 billion to the tsunami relief effort - more than that given over the past three years for the global fund to fight AIDS and other killer infectious diseases.

Western nations’ decision to forgive or defer repayment of billions of dollars in debt owed by tsunami-stricken nations and also by Iraq would also be a boon to African nations struggling to overcome abject poverty, Lewis said.

“But the signs are not auspicious. For whatever inexplicable reason, the Western countries, so magnificently responsive to South-East Asia, bridle in the most unseemly way when it comes to Africa,” Lewis said.

“The publics of the world have shown their desperate concern for the human condition. How long will it take for governments to do the same?”