Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2002. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.

Reuters NewMedia - Saturday, November 30, 2002
Michael Battye

The campaigns were a sign that Asia may finally be ready to overcome social taboos on talking about sexual activities in public in many of the region's countries where five out of eight of the world's people live.

Even so, experts say, efforts to educate people about how the disease is spread and to ease the deep social stigma it brands on sufferers may already be too late to head off a rapid spread.

China, where numbers are little more than best guesses in a land where many local officials prefer to ignore the disease, already has at least one million carriers of the HIV virus that can lead to AIDS.

India, the world's second most populous nation, has at least four million.

And nowhere is immune, not even way out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

In September, the tiny island nation of Vanuatu was so distraught by the confirmation of its first AIDS case that Prime Minister Edward Natapei made a national announcement of it.

The projections are terrifying.

The U.S. Central Intelligence agency reckons that in a mere seven years, by 2010, India will have the most HIV victims in the world -- somewhere between 20 and 25 million. China, it says, will have between 10 and 20 million.

The United Nations says the whole of the Asia-Pacific region has, right now, about 7.2 million people with HIV.

"BREAK OUT"

The percentages of Asian populations with HIV are low, mostly under one percent, which is way lower than in the ravaged countries of sub-Saharan Africa.

But that 7.2 million figure is a 10 percent increase on last year and the United Nations reckons that in some parts of India and China, infection rates are reaching 10 to 20 percent.

What is scaring the experts is that the disease is on the point of "breaking out" of the usually vulnerable social groups such as homosexuals and drug users who share needles and have high percentages of sufferers, into the general population.

"The experience in all other countries is that when you have sub-groups like that with very high prevalence, they do interact with the general population at some point," said Siri Tellier, Beijing representative of the United Nations Population Fund:

"This is what we're seeing, a high rate of increase and it is starting to spread to the general population."

That is why governments in countries such as China -- where a significant number of country folk got HIV from illegal blood collecting schemes -- are cranking up their publicity machines.

Saturday, the government collected about 1,000 people in a village hall just outside Beijing and showed them a series of documentaries on what AIDS is, how it is spread and how not to get it.

The official Xinhua news agency said the series would be broadcast on 1,000 local television stations and reach about half the country's 1.3 billion people.

Ignorance, it quoted Vice Health Minister Ma Xiaowei as saying at the premiere of the documentaries, was the major challenge in the battle against the disease.

At Beijing's Great Hall of the People, China's political center, the government launched a national campaign for students to spread out into the countryside to educate people about the disease and denounce discrimination against sufferers.

But the hopes of ending the visceral fear of AIDS sufferers that people in many parts of Asia feel may be forlorn.

Just ask Lao Ren, who contracted the virus in trying to boost the income of his poor rural family when he sold blood to one of the illegal schemes and now scrapes a living from a roadside stall in Bejing.

If his neighbors knew he had HIV, they would flee, he says. If his customers knew, they would shun him.

"If people knew I had HIV, I would be finished."
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