PARIS, Nov 30 (AFP) - Doctors and activists muster on Sunday for World AIDS Day, launching a campaign for easing the burden of stigma suffered by many of the 42 million people with AIDS and HIV.
"Live and Let Live," the slogan for the year-long UN-backed campaign, will lobby for understanding and tolerance for people with HIV/AIDS, who often face crippling discrimination in the workplace, from friends and even their close family.
"The fear of stigma leads to silence, and when it comes to fighting AIDS, silence is death. It suppresses public discussion about AIDS, and deters people from finding out whether they are infected," UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said in an address to mark World AIDS Day, now in its 15th year.
The latest raft of figures, released earlier this week by UN's specialist agency UNAIDS and the World Health Organisation (WHO), makes for grim reading.
Five million people this year will have become infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), and some 3.1 million will have died from AIDS.
After rampaging through sub-Saharan Africa, the infection is spreading like wildfire in the former Soviet Bloc, driven mainly by intravenous drug use.
Without urgent government intervention, it could become uncontrollable a few years from now in China and India, where prostitution is the main motor.
For the first time in the two-decade-old history of the epidemic, women account for half of infected people, compared with 48 percent last year, the report said.
The latest analysis shows the economic and social cost inflicted by AIDS.
Once the disease takes root in the mainstream population, rather than niche groups, and goes beyond a threshold, it can destroy a country's fabric and make it vulnerable to civil war or a nest for terrorism.
Southern Africa is reeling under a dual blow, of having the world's highest rates of HIV infection and of facing a drought that, in six countries, threatens more than 14 million people with starvation.
"Drought leading to famine is not new on this continent. What is new is AIDS," UN special envoy Stephen Lewis said in Johannesburg on Wednesday.
"This is what has destroyed the agricultural workers. This is what has curtailed the plots of land under agricultural use... There has never been such a desolating assault on a continent as is now taking place."
UNAIDS Executive Director Peter Piot said developed countries should wake up to the security risk posed by AIDS.
"There's definitely a case for increasing awareness in the developed countries that the AIDS epidemic, even far away in Africa or in India is affecting stability in the world," he warned.
Sub-Saharan Africa is home to 29.4 million people with HIV/AIDS, of which just a few tens of thousands have access to anti-retrovirals, the costly drugs that can prevent HIV from developing into full-blown AIDS.
In four countries, more than 30 percent of the adult population now have HIV, a rate that experts had once thought was impossible.
These countries -- Botswana (an infection rate of 38.8 percent); Lesotho (31 percent); Swaziland (33.4 percent) and Zimbabwe (33.7 percent) -- have brought life expectancy back to that of a century ago.
"Life expectancy in Botswana today is just 37 years, compared with 62 if AIDS had never existed," said Michel Sidibe, a UNAIDS official.
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