Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1998. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.

Reuters NewMedia - Tuesday December 1, 1998

President Clinton will mark World AIDS Day by announcing increased funding for vaccine research and new money to help foreign children orphaned by the disease, the White House said.

Schoolchildren in their uniforms joined prostitutes to stage a noisy march through New Delhi, vigils were held in several world capitals and big meetings were due to take place in Washington and San Francisco.

But the clamor of the activists contrasted sharply with the embarrassed official silence on AIDS from many governments in the developing world.

"It is the silence that hangs over our cemeteries when we bury loved ones knowing they died of AIDS, but not speaking of it," South African President Nelson Mandela told a big audience in KwaZulu-Natal, the country's worst affected province.

"It is the silence that is letting this disease sweep through our country, adding 1,500 people each day to more than three million already infected," he added.

Despite a marked fall in AIDS deaths in developed countries, the disease is gaining fast elsewhere, according to a report last month by the United Nations agency UNAIDS.

"The epidemic is frankly out of control in many places," it said. Global infections of HIV, the virus that leads to AIDS, rose 10 percent in 1998 and half the new cases were under 24, the agency noted.

Nearly six million new cases were reported this year, with the developing world, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, the epicenter of the disease.

"We are facing here a crisis that is unprecedented," UNAIDS executive director Peter Piot told a news conference in Johannesburg on the eve of World AIDS Day. "Be it man-made catastrophes such as apartheid, colonialism or natural disasters such as drought, none of these will claim so many victims.

Piot said more than a fifth of the adult population in Botswana, Namibia, Swaziland and Zimbabwe were infected with HIV and that South Africa was gaining fast.

In Kenya marches were organized in the worst-hit rural areas and hundreds of people joined a rally in the vast Nairobi slum of Dandora.

Young girls carried signs which read "Be faithful to one sexual partner" and "Using a condom means that you really care" as they marched past huge piles of rotting garbage and broken sewers to a rally.

Two areas of growing concern to AIDS campaigners this year are the growth of the disease in Asia and its spread among children and young people.

"Asia is as worrisome as Africa, particularly South and Southeast Asia. For some time HIV/AIDS has been regarded as a potential threat, but it is now more than just a threat, it is a reality," said a UNAIDS official.

In Geneva, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson said the AIDS situation was "an indictment" of the international allocation of resources to fight HIV/AIDS in developing nations. The epidemic has brought discrimination and practices leading to other human rights violations, she added.

"Countries like Botswana simply do not have the means to launch major prevention efforts or distribute effective drugs to treat HIV/AIDS," Robinson said in a statement.

Carol Bellamy, the executive director of the U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF) stressed that young people were bearing the brunt of the AIDS casualties and that the disease was wiping out substantial reductions in child mortality. "At a time when rich countries have made substantial progress in controlling the virus, the unfolding catastrophe of HIV/AIDS in the developing world is a measure of how profoundly the human rights of children and young people in those countries are being violated," she said in a statement.

Elliott said care for sick children was another important issue, as well as the increasing number of children who are being orphaned by the disease.
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