Malian appointed head of U.N. AIDS program

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The United Nations appointed Michel Sidibe of Mali on Monday as its top official in the global fight against AIDS.

Sidibe will succeed Peter Piot, whose deputy he has been since last year. Piot, a Belgian, has led the U.N. response to the AIDS epidemic as executive director of the Joint U.N. Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) since its inception in 1995.

Piot, who co-discovered the Ebola virus in Zaire (now Democratic Republic of the Congo) in 1976, announced in April that he would leave the job at the end of this year.

He was praised in June by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon as a "tireless leader who has been at the vanguard of the response to AIDS since the earliest days of the epidemic."

Sidibe, 56, began his career in health care when he developed an interest in the welfare of the nomadic Tuareg people in his native Mali, a U.N. biography said.

In 1987 he was recruited by the U.N. children's agency, UNICEF, to work in Zaire, where he managed an immunization program for 30 million people. He also worked in Swaziland, Burundi and Uganda before joining Geneva-based UNAIDS in 2001.

The announcement of Sidibe's appointment came on World AIDS Day.

The United Nations says that globally, an estimated 33 million people are infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS and 25 million have died so far from the incurable disease.

(Reporting by Patrick Worsnip)