BANGKOK, Dec 1 (AFP) - Thailand is seeing a decrease in the number of new AIDS cases, the health ministry said Sunday amid hope that the neediest of the country's 600,000 HIV-positive citizens will soon receive less than dollar-a-day treatment for the virus.

The ministry announced on its website that it aims to limit the number of new cases of HIV, the virus which causes AIDS, to 17,000 per year.

Last year there were 25,000 new cases, compared to a staggering 150,000 new cases in 1992, it said.

"It's manageable," Mechai Viravaidya, a high-profile AIDS activist in Thailand, told AFP. "But it means we have to do a lot more public education."

Mechai, who is chairman of the Population and Community Development Association, regretted the drop in public education spending to eight percent of the national budget from the ideal level of 20 percent.

But the activist was upbeat about the Thai government's announced plans to begin wide distribution of antiretrovirals (ARVs), the best available medicines that stem the march of HIV, at less than a dollar a day.

Thailand's Government Pharmaceutical Organisation (GPO) made world headlines in March this year when it announced it would start selling the world's cheapest triple-therapy ARV drug, known as GPO-VIR.

It sells for 27 dollars per month. Previously, a similar course of treatment cost up to 240 dollars a month.

"To those who can not afford it, the government will be able to supply" the drugs, Mechai added.

GPO directors said this year that while some 20,000 Thais now take the ARVs, about 50,000 people here could benefit from them.

Thailand's observance of World AIDS Day was low-key Sunday, with several smaller AIDS awareness marches in upcountry provinces and a fundraising concert in Bangkok.

A prison hospice programme was also reportedly launched that would allow prisoners terminally ill with AIDS to spend remaining days with their relatives.

But in a clear sign that the subject of sex remains highly sensitive in conservative Thailand, the health ministry was reported to have ended its free condom campaign at nightspots because of complaints it promoted sex.

The Nation newspaper cited Charan Tarinwuthipong, director-general of the communicable disease control department, as saying that sexual transmission of HIV accounts for 85 percent of all infections in the kingdom.

One million Thais are believed to have been infected with HIV-AIDS, and a third of them have already died.

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