CHINA: China, long criticised for ignoring a potential explosion of the scourge, has marked World AIDS Day by launching awareness and prevention campaigns in the world's most populous country.
The campaigns yesterday were a sign that at least some in Asia may finally be ready to overcome social taboos on talking openly about sexual activities in many of the region's countries where five out of eight of the world's people live.
At Beijing's Great Hall of the People, the government announced it would send one million students into the countryside over the next year to spread the word about HIV/AIDS prevention and persuade people not to discriminate against sufferers.
Top actor Pu Cunxin hugged AIDS victims in a graphic message to China's 1.3 billion people that the disease which has ravaged sub-Saharan Africa is not passed by casual contact. Even so, experts say, efforts to educate people about how the disease is spread and to ease the deep social stigma it brands on sufferers may already be too late.
China, where numbers are little more than best guesses in a land where many local officials prefer to ignore the disease, already has at least one million carriers of the HIV virus that can lead to AIDS.
The CIA believes that by 2010, India will have the most HIV victims in the world, somewhere between 20 and 25 million. China, it says, will have between 10 and 20 million.
Estimates released by the United Nations last week indicate that more than 40 million people worldwide are infected with HIV, the virus which causes AIDS, the vast majority of them in sub-Saharan Africa.
AIDS will have killed 3.1 million people by the end of this year, while 5 million more will have been infected, UNAIDS said in its report. Ominously, the virus appears to be both spreading into regions which could transform the epidemic into a truly global disaster and developing resistance to AIDS-fighting drugs, complicating the quest for a vaccine.
In southern Africa, almost 30 million people are already infected with the disease. Food output is falling, due to drought and the fact that agricultural workers are dying. Millions of children have been orphaned by the disease. Cemetery space is running out, average life expectancy is falling and billions of dollars are being chopped from the region's already fragile economies.
"There is no longer a distinction between those living with HIV/ AIDS and those who are not," South Africa's deputy president, Mr Jacob Zuma, said in the government's official World AIDS Day speech. "We are all living with the disease and are affected by it in many ways."
Many of yesterday's AIDS Day activities focused on three major areas of concern as the epidemic takes hold. Treatment, now limited to expensive and complicated cocktails of anti-retroviral drugs, reaches only a tiny handful of AIDS sufferers who need it. Fear and prejudice stalk victims of the disease, who are often ostracised from community support networks at their moment of greatest need. And awareness of the disease lags, despite massive efforts to educate people about how it is transmitted and how to avoid it..
Officials point to some hopeful signs, including some successful AIDS awareness campaigns in Africa and moves by drug companies to slash the price of anti-AIDS drugs. However, treatment, even when it is available, is always going to be the most expensive option.
UNAIDS calculates that by 2007 the world will have to find about $15 billion a year to treat and combat AIDS in low- and middle-income countries, but contributions to the new Global Fund designed to spearhead anti-AIDS work are lagging.
The former South African President, Mr Nelson Mandela,who has become one of his country's most prominent campaigners for AIDS awareness, said at a World AIDS Day appearance in Bloemfontein that the fear and stigma associated with the disease was almost as damaging as the epidemic itself. - (Reuters)