Peter Piot, who has been with the United Nations in the fight against HIV/AIDS for 13 years, will step down from his position as executive director of the Joint U.N. Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said in a speech prior the 2008 High Level Meeting on HIV/AIDS in New York.

Piot has been a part of UNAIDS even since its inception in 1995, fighting to cut rates of HIV/AIDS in poor countries by assuring supplies of antiviral drugs. He succeeded to draw attention on what repercussions the disease has on health and economy. In fact, this was one of his goals, the other two being “to form a broad coalition” and “to mobilize the money” needed to fight the disease, he said, according to Bloomberg.

Back in April, Piot, 59, said in a little noticed statement that he would give up his position at the end of this year.

The Belgium-born doctor and microbiologist co-discovered the deadly Ebola virus in 1976. In 1992, he joined the World Health Organization’s Global Program on AIDS and since then he has been the one taking care that HIV-infected people have access to drugs in the poorest countries in southern Africa.

A report released by the U.N. on Monday, the U.N. health programs provided anti-retroviral treatment to an additional 1 million people in 2007. However, about 2.5 million people became infected with AIDS in the same year.

The good news is that, overall, rates in global AIDS deaths and infections show a decline. An estimated 32.2 million people worldwide were living with HIV in December 2007 compared with 39.5 million people in 2006. Also, the annual rate of new infections seemed to have declined over the last decade. There were 2.5 million new infections in 2007 down from 3.2 million infections in 1998.