TORONTO - Drugs are no good without food in the fight against HIV/ AIDS in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and the essential role of proper nutrition has been forgotten, the United Nations World Food Program said on Wednesday.

Organizers of the 16th International AIDS Conference marked a small victory with the announcement that more than 1.6 million people globally now receive lifesaving HIV drugs.

But without proper food, victims of the disease have little will to live, the World Food Program said.

"In a study we did in rural Haiti, we found most of our patients with HIV disease spent more than half of all their time and other resources looking for food," said Dr. Paul Farmer, a professor at Harvard Medical School who has worked in Haiti since the AIDS epidemic started 25 years ago.

Living proof: 28-year-old Joseph Jeune was skeletal before being placed on a food program that included rice, beans, iodized salt and at one point, meat. His family had already purchased his coffin.

"I wouldn't be alive," Jeune, a shoe-shiner from Lascahobas, Haiti, told Reuters through a translator.

"It's the guts that hold up the body. If the gut is empty, how can you stand up?"

Farmer, who has treated Jeune, said he has gained 45 pounds (20 kg) since he was put on the food program, more than half of it in the first two months of therapy.

Now Jeune, who traveled from Haiti to Toronto for the conference, looks slim and healthy.

"If you don't have anything to eat and you have HIV/AIDS you've got two diseases, HIV and hunger," said Jeune.

"I was washed out, I was weak, weak, weak. But since I've had food assistance, I feel strong."

Jeune said being hungry also makes having the disease eat away at you psychologically.

"These medicines, when you start taking them, they whisper in your ear 'you need to eat, you need to eat,' they make you hungry," he said.

"When you wake up in the morning, you take your medicines and you haven't eaten, it makes your stomach bite you."

Farmer, who is also co-founder of Partners in Health, a nonprofit organization, said, "We don't know how to treat this advanced disease without food." Some drugs also need to be taken on a full stomach, or be soon followed by food, he added.

The World Food Program, which provides food assistance to 21 of 25 nations with the highest HIV prevalence rates, and the United Nations AIDS agency UNAIDS say that between 3.8 million and 6.4 million people need nutritional support from 2006 to 2008, at a cost of $1.1 billion.

It costs 66 cents a day to provide nutritious food to an AIDS patient and his or her family, the groups said.