Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1995. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.

Reuters NewMedia, Inc. - 1 Dec 1995
Rachel Noeman

Diana, patron of an AIDS charity, said in a speech that, with no cure or vaccine yet in sight, the day was an opportunity to raise awareness to prevent infection from the outset.

"We are all reminded of the need to protect ourselves, our friends and our loved ones," said the estranged wife of British royal heir Prince Charles and mother of two boys.

She said in a recent controversial TV interview she had taken her sons, William and Harry, to visit dying AIDS patients.

The HIV virus lives in bodily fluids and most people become infected during sex or sharing drug needles.

In China, the People's Daily quoted Health Minister Chen Minzhang as warning that a surge in AIDS cases seriously threatened the world's most populous nation of 1.2 billion people, driving home the folly of regarding it as a "foreigners' disease."

The World Health Organization estimates there have been 4.5 million full-blown AIDS cases worldwide and that 18 million adults and 1.5 million children are infected with HIV.

Eleven million people in Africa are infected, three million in Asia.

In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control say over half a million people have been diagnosed with AIDS since 1981. In Western Europe some 450,000 people have HIV/AIDS.

WHO predicts that by the year 2000, the virus will have attacked 30 to 40 million people and by 1997 the annual number of new HIV infections in Asia will exceed those in Africa.

"In the United States and Western Europe, AIDS continued to be the leading cause of death for people under 45 -- a bigger killer than violent crime, which gets far more media attention," Dr. Peter Piot, a Belgian physician who is executive director of UNAIDS, coordinating the efforts of a number of U.N. anti-AIDS agencies, said.

Referring to factors that created vulnerability, he said more progress was needed in achieving equal rights for women in the legal, economic and educational spheres. "Otherwise, they may not be in a position to leave or negotiate safer sex with a partner who is putting them at risk of HIV," he said at UN headquarters in New York.

A German court sentenced UB Plasma owner and managing director Ulrich Kleist and head controller Dieter Stueer to four years in prison and lab doctor Alexander Kressler to three years on World AIDS Day for distributing shoddily tested blood products, causing the death of at least two people.

The executives admitted during their 16-month trial that they had at various times combined blood samples from up to three donors before testing them for HIV or hepatitis.

Their 71,302 batches of plasma in question went to more than 50 hospitals and sold for more than $3.5 million.

A British court Friday jailed a HIV-positive Ugandan woman who injected her lover with blood as a "parting present" because he wanted to leave her for someone else.

Judge Heather Steel, sentencing 25-year-old Rhena Ndagga to two years in jail, said the crime was "deliberate, calculating and cruel." She recommended Ndagga be deported, saying there was a risk she could commit a another offense.

The judge said Ndagga's former lover, David Kabagwire, had spent the months since the attack in constant fear. So far, blood tests had been negative, but a final verdict could take months.

In China, where soaring prostitution and drug abuse are pushing AIDS cases ever higher, state media this year junked their puritanical socialist-era caution to launch an unprecedented public education drive.

Beijing has tallied 2,428 HIV carriers, including 77 with full-blown AIDS, although experts estimate the HIV total to be as high as 100,000.

Moscow pressed ahead with strict measures to make long-term visitors to Russia prove they were free of the virus.

Of 2,291 Romanian AIDS sufferers alive, some 91 percent were children -- more than half the pediatric AIDS cases for the whole of Europe.

But in many cases their conditions have improved from the harrowing scenes immediately after the 1989 revolution. Usually with the help of foreign charities, many of the worst hospital wards and filthy orphanages have been cleaned and care improved.

In Scotland and the United States, floodlights were dimmed in several cities.

U.S. health groups this week unveiled a frank new series of fast-paced contemporary television for young adults. Some of the adverts promoted abstinence. Others stressed "safer sex" and condom use to avoid contracting the HIV virus.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City draped artworks including Pablo Picasso's oil portrait of writer Gertrude Stein and Andy Warhol's "Self-Portrait" in black cloth in a "Day without Art" to recognize the artists throughout the world who have died from the devastating disease.

In Bangladesh, which is striving hard to keep AIDS at bay in a country which so far has only 44 known HIV positive cases, thousands of women held colorful rallies in Dhaka calling for greater awareness of AIDS.

"Clean sex is most enjoyable," read a placard carried by one woman.
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