NEW DELHI, Dec 1 (AFP) - India, home to the second-largest HIV/AIDS-infected population in the world, took stock of the problem on World AIDS Day Sunday amid renewed pledges to fight the scourge, provide affordable medicines and end discrimination.
Social activists, doctors and students marked World AIDS Day with street marches, programmes and seminars as the government said it was committed to fighting the disease.
In the eastern Indian city of Bhubaneswar more than 100,000 people including HIV sufferers scribbled messages on a six-kilometre (3.7 mile) banner.
"It has been a rare show of solidarity to fight AIDS and we have to take it forward," an organising spokesman said.
The government Sunday unveiled the results of a national survey which said most female sex workers were aware of AIDS and made their clients use condoms.
The survey conducted across 32 states and federal territories by the National AIDS Control Organisation said brothel-based sex workers were better-placed to insist their clients take precautions.
"Non-brothel sex workers are more disadvantaged in terms of awareness, condoms usage and access to non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working in the area of HIV/AIDS.
"Only 38 per cent of such sex workers said they declined to have sex with a client if he refused to use condoms," it said, adding that more than 90 percent of brothel-based workers now use condoms.
According to Indian Health Minister Shatrughan Sinha 85 percent of India's AIDS/HIV sufferers are victims of unsafe sex.
India says four million Indians are living with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, more than any country apart from South Africa. A US study last month predicted there would be 20-25 million Indians infected with HIV by 2010.
Meanwhile national health organisations, NGOs and medical forums Sunday called for affordable medicines and said New Delhi must forge laws to end discrimination against AIDS patients, reports said.
In India's northeast, thousands pledged to prevent AIDS from spiralling out of control in a region where the disease has already assumed epidemic proportions.
Schoolchildren, health workers and rehabilitated drug addicts, holding placards and singing specially-composed songs, marched through the streets in seven northeastern states to mark World AIDS Day.
India was among those Asian nations warned recently by the United Nations to take swift action to prevent AIDS from reaching epidemic proportions.
Some 100,000 HIV-positive patients live within Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura states, and authorities fear the disease could spread rapidly due to the region's acute drug problem.
The states account for less than three percent of India's one billion-plus population but are home to more than 30 percent of the country's total intravenous drug users, according to estimates.
S.I. Ahmed, the chairman of the Assam AIDS Prevention Society, blamed intravenous drug use more than promiscuous sex for the "quantam increase" in the number of AIDS cases in India's northeast.
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