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

Reuters NewMedia - Monday December 2, 2002
Michael Battye

The campaigns were a sign that at least some in Asia may finally be ready to overcome social taboos on talking openly about sexual activities in much of the region, where five out of eight of the world's people live.

At Beijing's Great Hall of the People, the government announced it would send one million students into the countryside over the next year to spread the word about HIV/AIDS prevention and persuade people not to discriminate against those infected with the virus.

Top actor Pu Cunxin hugged AIDS patients in a graphic message to China's 1.3 billion people that the disease that has ravaged sub-Saharan Africa is not passed by casual contact.

Even so, experts say, efforts to educate people about how the disease is spread and to ease the deep social stigma it carries 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.

Worldwide, 42 million people have the AIDS virus.

No country is immune. In September, the tiny Pacific 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.

TERRIFYING PROJECTIONS

The disease projections are terrifying.

The US Central Intelligence Agency reckons that by 2010, India will have the most HIV-positive citizens 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 living with HIV.

The percentages of Asian populations with HIV are low, mostly under one percent, which is much lower than in sub-Saharan Africa, where the United Nations says about nine percent of all people between the ages of 15 and 49 carry HIV.

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

What scares experts is that the disease is on the point of "breaking out" of vulnerable social groups such as homosexuals and especially drug users, who share needles and have high HIV rates, 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."

CRANKING UP PUBLICITY

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

On Saturday, the government collected about 1,000 people in a village hall outside Beijing and showed them 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.

Ray Yip of UNICEF said China had three or four years to contain the spread of HIV so it did not become a "hyper endemic" country and praised the government for starting to make serious efforts.

"We're not only having all kinds of responses, all kinds of efforts, but we are also seeing they are addressing the more sensitive issues," he said. "They're willing to bring out the faces, willing to say that discrimination is unacceptable."

But the hopes of ending the irrational fear of people with AIDS that people in many parts of Asia feel may be futile.

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.

He now scrapes a living from a roadside stall in Beijing.

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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