Barcelona, July 11 :    Barcelona, July 11:  Act Up is the official disrupter of AIDS conferences. This US-based, originally gay group, AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, has been as raucous, militant and thereby media-grabbing at the international AIDS conference as they have been at other such meets since they erupted in full fury at San Francisco in 1990. Yesterday, their demonstrations were the noisiest and most destructive yet. First, they held a rally against Coca-Cola. The backdrop was a 25-feet inflatable Coke bottle with the slogan: 'Coke's Neglect Death for Workers in Africa: AIDS Treatment Now. End Medical Apartheid.' They proceeded to puncture it with needles, amid hoots, claps, whistles and ululating. Their 'people's court' found CEO Douglas Daft guilty of discriminatory medical treatment. Daft, ironically, is a corporate sponsor of the Global Business Coalition on HIV/AIDS. The protest was against what Act Up considers Coca-Cola's doublespeak on workers welfare. It refuses to extend its promised 'comprehensive anti-HIV treatment' to its vast workforce outside the US. It has provided this expensive anti-retroviral treatment only to its 1,500 direct employees, a minuscule number compared to the 98,000 employed at Coke's affiliated companies, major bottling, canning and distributing enterprises, many owned in whole or part by the US giant, in Africa. AIDS has struck almost 25 per cent of the population in the worst affected Sub-Saharan countries. Coca-Cola is the largest private employer on this continent. Next, they stormed the cavernous exhibition hall containing the stands of pharma companies and those of governments. Delegates perusing literature and consuming with greater enthusiasm free coffee (and giveaway bags, clocks and mugs) stopped on their tracks, and then made a discreet retreat as the Act Up army - followed by a phalanx of TV crew and other mediapersons - invaded the place. Their target today was not the pharma giants but the stalls of G8 countries, the US, Japan, Germany, the UK, France, Italy, Canada and Spain. They tore down promotional material and overturned counters to plaster the booths with the query 'Where is the 10 billion?' The reference was to the Global Fund set up last year at the Genoa summit on the initiative of UN secretary general Kofi Annan to fight AIDS, TB and malaria. The target was a corpus of $10 billion but only $2 billion have been pledged so far. Act Up says the Fund's coffers have been almost emptied in the first round of disbursements made earlier this year (of which India, incidentally, got $0). In the past year, 3 million have died of AIDS. If the trend is not reversed, by 2015, 100 million will be infected, of whom 95 million are likely to die because of lack of treatment. Act Up places the responsibility squarely on the rich nations to bear responsibility for the 22 million AIDS deaths to date. And they 'must immediately pay the additional $10 billion needed for the global war against AIDS'.