Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1996. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.

Reuters NewMedia, Inc. - Sunday, 1 December 1996,

Two, 18-meter high red ribbons, the symbol of international AIDS awareness, adorned the Sydney Harbor Bridge in Australia while thousands of people in Thailand distributed condoms at massage parlors and even petrol stations.

In Manila, 500 members of HIV/AIDS Network Philippines released hundreds of red balloons marked with the words "World AIDS Day" while awareness groups in Tokyo opened a round-the-clock telephone counselling service in eight languages and hot lines for Japanese women and homosexuals.

As many remembered the dead and dying, health experts in India, the world's second most populous nation, warned the most horrific toll may still be to come.

The number of people infected with the HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) in India will explode in four years, dwarfing the current level of about five million cases, an expert with the Indian Health Organization said on Sunday. HIV causes AIDS.

"By the turn of the century, this is likely to go up to 20 million in a best-case scenario and 50 million in a worst case scenario," said I.H. Gilada, the organization's secretary-general.

Indian officials says widespread prostitution is responsible for spreading the virus but the IHO assigns part of the blame to official apathy.

"There has not been enough official attention given to AIDS," Gilada said. "People are suddenly waking up now that the situation looks like it's getting out of control."

The forecasts are equally grim for other developing Asian countries.

The World Health Organization estimates that nearly 28 million people have been infected worldwide with HIV since the start of the epidemic 15 years ago.

But while HIV infection rates are dropping in Europe and the U.S., health experts warn that HIV is mushrooming in Asia.

About 800,000 Thais have been infected and that number is expected to rise to over one million by 2000, the Thai Health Ministry has said.

Up to a million people in Indonesia and 300,000 people in Vietnam are expected to be infected with HIV by 2000.

Despite Sunday's events, efforts to educate Asia's masses on the disease are being held back by poor health education and cultural or religious taboos against open discussion of sex or the use of condoms.

In mainly Muslim Indonesia, where up to one million people are expected to catch HIV by 2000, the government has said Muslim sensitivities do not allow it to promote condom use to combat AIDS.

The use of contraceptives is also a sensitive issue in Muslim Malaysia and Brunei and predominantly Roman Catholic Philippines.

Prudish sexual attitudes and misconceptions also work against AIDS education efforts in Chinese society, where AIDS is viewed as a "foreign disease."

At an AIDS expo in Beijing on Sunday, a manufacturer displayed a toilet seat with an automatic protective covering, saying it would help prevent the spread of sexually transmitted disease, a myth long dispelled in the west.

Even in cosmopolitan Hong Kong, sex education is virtually non-existent in classrooms.

A recent survey found that about 60 percent of 14-year-old girls in the colony thought they could contract AIDS from kissing or from toilet seats, and few teenagers knew the facts about contraception, sexually transmitted diseases or abortion.

"All this is very gloomy but there is some reason for hope," Dr Peter Piot, executive director of UNAIDS, the joint U.N. programme on AIDS and HIV, said recently.

He said studies showed treating sexually transmitted diseases could greatly cut HIV infection rates, and that education efforts in Thailand, for example, had cut infection among army recruits. But he warned the problem will get much worse before it gets better.

"The epidemic is not over -- far from over -- not even close."
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