HONG KONG, Dec 1 (AFP) - Thousands marched Saturday for the millions of Asians facing a slow death by AIDS, as the region finally showed signs of taking the pandemic seriously.
World AIDS Day Saturday was marked by official and unofficial events across the region with governments and activists alike pushing the message, still apparently unheeded by many Asians, that unprotected sex and needle-sharing can kill.
The activities came as a UN report released this week showed HIV or AIDS cases in Asia and the Pacific had reached 7.1 million, with a staggering 1.07 million adults and children being newly infected with HIV in 2001.
But experts warned Asian governments were still not doing enough to stop the spread of AIDS.
"In large parts of Asia and the Pacific, prevention programmes are poorly funded and resourced," the report said.
"Because many high risk practices are frowned upon and even criminalised, there are serious political hurdles to prevention."
China was to broadcast its first televised AIDS awareness programme Saturday in a bid to halt the country's astonishing rise in cases. Estimates put Chinese HIV/AIDS cases at anything up to 1.5 million and Shanghai has recorded a 45 percent jump this year, according to local media.
Central China has also been beset by a horrific debacle in which tens of thousands of paid blood donors were infected by illegal blood banks. Whole villages are now wasting away in a case which provoked an international outcry.
Chinese sufferers however received a boost Saturday with the announcement that the prices of two crucial anti-AIDS drugs are to be cut to two-thirds.
In India, with an estimated five million HIV and AIDS cases, the publicity drive centred on drug addicts passing on the disease by sharing needles.
India's northeast borders the notorious heroin-producing "Golden Triangle" of Laos, Myanmar and Thailand and is home to 30 percent of the country's intravenous drug users.
"Sharing of needles by drug users in the northeast rather than promiscuous sex has led to a quantum increase in the number of AIDS cases," said S.I. Ahmed, chairman of the Assam AIDS Prevention Society.
"But today, the drug users are passing the infection to the general population in the region through their sex partners. HIV transmission rates from mother to child is also assuming frightening proportions."
India is expected soon to overtake South Africa as the world's most AIDS-infected country.
"In India the disease is growing at an alarming rate," said Ashok Rau of the National AIDS Control Organisation.
"It is no more confined to prostitutes and truck drivers. Everyone, from corporate chiefs to college students and children are being infected by AIDS now."
Parades, rallies and fund-raising events marked World AIDS Day in Thailand, where the virus has become the number one killer. Three hundred thousand of the one million Thais thought to have contracted the disease over the past decade have already died.
Two dozen condom-laden rickshaws toured Hanoi to spread the message of safe sex in Vietnam, where the burgeoning sex industry has created fears of an AIDS explosion.
Cambodia's first Condom Cafe was due to open in Phnom Penh Monday, aimed educating street children and providing sex-disease clinic, as activists warned AIDS could wipe out a second generation after the one decimated by more than two decades of civil war.
World AIDS Day was also marked in Japan, Pakistan, Australia, Bangladesh, Nepal and the Philippines.
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