The organization is recommending that more than 4 million low-skill workers are hired to administer anti-retroviral drugs, provide AIDS counseling, and handle other tasks typically provided by doctors and nurses.

The move is part of a new set of guidelines aimed at helping poor countries hardest hit by the AIDS epidemic to train additional health staff and offer new incentives to doctors and nurses to keep them from emigrating to wealthy nations with doctor-shortages such as the United Kingdom.

Estimated to cost at least US$7 billion over the next five years, the plan also calls for the hiring of an additional 2.4 million doctors, nurses and midwives in the developing world to help accomplish a United Nations’ goal of universal access to HIV/AIDS treatment services by 2010.

The plan would be a major boost to health-care systems in sub-Saharan Africa, where health-care workers are in short supply. In Malawi, for example, there are more than 7,400 HIV- positive patients per doctor, according to the WHO. By comparison, there are two doctors for each HIV-positive patient in the U.S. and UK. Read more