World Marks AIDS Day
Government officials and health advocates around the globe marked World AIDS Day with calls for urgent efforts to stop the galloping spread of the disease.
In India, more than 500 students and several sex workers marched through the busy streets of New Delhi to help spread public awareness of the killer disease AIDS.
Teenagers in school uniforms carried banners and placards with slogans proclaiming "No one should die of ignorance" and "Sex is fun, stay with one" as passers-by looked on in bemusement.
India has an estimated three to five million people living with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which leads to AIDS.
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South African President Nelson Mandela urged his constituents on Tuesday to break the silence surrounding AIDS, which daily infects more than 1,500 people in the country.
"It is the silence that hangs over our cemeteries when we bury loved ones knowing they died of AIDS, but not speaking of it," Mandela told a big audience at a World AIDS Day rally in KwaZulu-Natal, the country's most severely affected province.
South Africa is in the midst of a determined campaign to spread awareness about the AIDS epidemic. The country has one of the highest rates of infection in the world, despite its relative wealth when compared to the rest of Africa.
In Japan, the Health Ministry organized rallies and charity concerts in a central Tokyo square to publicize the threat of AIDS and to demonstrate support for those suffering from the disease.
"It's extremely important to have an event every year to repeatedly remind people that AIDS exists," said Dr. Yoshiki Sakurai, an official of the Japanese Foundation for AIDS Prevention.
Discrimination against AIDS sufferers remains powerful in Japan, and the country still lags behind many Western countries in AIDS treatment facilities and education, Sakurai said.
China is bracing for a fourfold rise in AIDS cases within two years and putting in place a 12-year plan to try to slow the rapid increase, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Monday.
Although China has officially recorded 11,170 HIV cases, Health Ministry officials estimate that mor than 300,000 Chinese have the disease. Xinhua said that number is expected to swell to 1.2 million by 2000.
Experts have warned recently that while powerful new drugs have sent AIDS deaths plunging in industrialized countries, the disease continues to kill millions of people in the impoverished nations of Africa and Asia.
President Clinton planned to mark AIDS day with the announcement of $10 million in emergency grants to help poorer nations care for children orphaned by AIDS.
According to a new U.N. report, about 33.4 million people around the world are infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Two-thirds of the afflicted are in sub-Saharan Africa, where 2 million people will die of the disease south of the Sahara this year, four times the total for the rest of the world.
Adult HIV infection rates in Botswana, Namibia, Swaziland and Zimbabwe are between 20 percent and 25 percent, the United Nations says.
About 1.7 million people in Africa and 700,000 people in Asia and the Pacific are infected with HIV every year, according to U.N. figures.
The Cambodian government marked AIDS day with the grim announcement that 150,000 people (1.3 percent of the population) are infected with the AIDS virus.
Officials said that 50 to 70 people contract HIV in Cambodia every day, the highest HIV infection rate in Asia.
The economic crisis sweeping through Southeast Asia has made it even more difficult for governments in the region to curb the spread of AIDS.
On the eve of AIDS day, Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa launched a plea to the United Nations for governments around the world to contribute more funds to the worldwide fight against AIDS.
"We aren't doing enough to say to governments, 'For goodness sake, why have so much money for death and so little for life?'" Tutu said.
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