1 December 2008

PARIS – French first lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy is putting her star power behind the global AIDS campaign to help fight a disease that counts her brother among its millions of victims.

The wife of President Nicolas Sarkozy will mark World AIDS Day on Monday by unveiling her new mission as the first ambassador to the Geneva-based Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

"I can put all of the media coverage directed toward me to the service of a useful cause," the 40-year-old supermodel-turned-singer said in an interview to be published in Monday's edition of Elle magazine.

After her brother Virginio, a photographer, died of AIDS in 2006, the Bruni family set up a foundation in his name to promote AIDS education, but the first lady said her work with the fund would be "on a whole other level".

"I will make myself available to all those who are working on the ground with the global fund and who ask for my help. I will be working hand-in-hand with them," she said.

The title of Bruni-Sarkozy's third album "Comme si de rien n'etait" (As If Nothing Happened) is named after one of Virginio's photographs. He died at the age of 46.

"Because of my brother, of course I am very sensitive to the issue of AIDS," she said.

But the Italian-born first lady stressed that with 33 million people infected worldwide with HIV, AIDS had an impact far beyond her family.

"This is a pandemic. We tend to forget, we are used to it. But look at the figures. It's staggering."

As the fund's active ambassador, Bruni-Sarkozy wants world attention to zero in on preventing mother-to-child AIDS transmission - a condition virtually wiped out in Europe with easily-accessible treatment but which affects 30 percent of newborns in Africa.

"What I would like to do, working with the global fund, is to communicate directly with mothers and their children," said Bruni-Sarkozy. "This is probably complicated... We have to find a way to talk to them and that is why it's important to be on the ground."

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