Barcelona, Spain ? As 15,000 scientists, health care workers and activists gathered here for the 14th International AIDS Conference, three of the most important organizations involved in the global AIDS epidemic called Saturday for a new alliance to bring AIDS medicines to the world’s poor on a massive scale.

The alliance would make health care experts available in developing countries where most AIDS patients live but few are treated.

The proposers of the new organization say cheaper AIDS drugs, political commitment and simplified treatment plans all of which, to a large extent, have been achieved in the past two years won’t be enough to reach the goal of wider use of optimal medical treatment for human immunodeficiency virus infection.

“This scaling up is going to be a job of a completely different order. If we don’t start to do things dramatically different, like a military operation, then it will be just talk, talk, talk,” said Joep Lange, incoming leader of the International AIDS Society, a group of AIDS physicians and researchers.

Officials of the World Health Organization and UNAIDS, which is run by the United Nations and the World Bank, joined IAS in the call for creation of an alliance. They discussed the idea Saturday with representatives of about 40 government agencies and academic and activist organizations. The group will meet again in October to formulate more specific plans to create an independent organization.

Today, about 730,000 of the world’s 40 million people infected with HIV are on combination antiretroviral therapy.

WHO, for example, estimates that 6 million people in the poorest countries are showing symptoms that could be helped by antiretroviral treatment. It has set a goal of putting 3 million people on antiretroviral therapy by the end of 2005.

In Africa, 30,000 are being treated. That’s about 10 times as many as two years ago, when the last international AIDS conference in Durban, South Africa, led to much rhetoric about the moral imperative to bring the life-sustaining drugs to the poor.

Representatives of various groups that met here before the conference’s opening today said a global treatment alliance was not without hazards. In particular, the alliance should not be drawn into the prevention vs. treatment debate about how to spend money for AIDS.

“We need to make sure this never becomes an ‘either or’ thing, which some people are continually trying to make it,” said Helene Gayle, an AIDS expert with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, formerly with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“We need to make sure we don’t get polarized in the process,” said Alex Ross of the British government’s foreign aid agency.