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Activists fight to increase AIDS awareness

Condom mascots distribute condoms and leaflets on AIDS prevention at an activity marking World AIDS Day in Taipei County yesterday. PHOTO: HO YU-HUA, TAIPEI TIMES

Activists sought yesterday to keep the battle against HIV in the public eye on World AIDS Day in the face of growing complacency amid progress in treating and slowing the spread of the disease.

Even the Miss World beauty pageant on the Chinese holiday island of Sanya was enlisted to get out the message that the disease kills some 6,000 people daily.

Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) appeared on the front page of major state-controlled newspapers shaking the hand of a woman HIV carrier the day after the UN warned up to 50 million Chinese were at risk of contracting HIV/AIDS.

Dec. 1 has become a time of grim stocktaking as AIDS campaigners worldwide sound the alarm over the disease's rampage through Africa, the threat it poses to Asia and former Soviet republics and the risks to vulnerable communities such as sex workers, drug users and gay men.

In Australia, campaigners warned that complacency after earlier success in fighting HIV/AIDS risked giving rise to a new wave of infections.

"This is the moment it all could go astray. This is the moment when it can become a pandemic," said Vince Lovegrove, an AIDS awareness educator, while calling for a new campaign aimed at a new generation.

Government figures show that by the end of last year, 26,267 Australians had been diagnosed with HIV and 10,l25 people had been diagnosed with AIDS, with 6,723 having died.

Last month, UNAIDS announced that the prevalence of HIV or AIDS -- the percentage of the world's population living with the HIV virus or the disease it causes -- peaked in the late 1990s.

It also reduced its estimate of the number of people living with HIV or AIDS to 33 million from nearly 40 million after overhauling data collection methods.

The tally of new infections has fallen, too, to an estimated 2.5 million this year from 3 million in the late 1990s.

Meanwhile, the agonizing effort to bring antiretroviral drugs to Africa, where more than two-thirds of people with HIV/AIDS live, is now bearing fruit.

At the end of last year, more than 2 million people were getting the vital pills, a 54 percent increase over the previous year, the WHO said.

The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria said on Friday the number of people on antiretroviral (ARV) drugs it is funding has doubled in the past year to 1.4 million.

"Despite substantial progress against AIDS worldwide, we are still losing ground," says James Shelton of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in a commentary appearing in medical journal The Lancet yesterday.

He says treatment is still only available to about 10 percent of those in need, while in developing countries, "the number of new infections continues to dwarf the numbers who start antiretroviral therapy in developing countries."

Indonesia -- which the UN says has the fastest growing HIV epidemic in Asia -- marked the day with the launch of its first national campaign to promote the use of condoms, which account for less than 1 percent of contraception use.

The campaign in the world's most populous Muslim nation aims to remove the stigma of condom use.

Stigma is also a concern for campaigners in South Korea, where the number of HIV/AIDS cases stood at 5,155 as of the end of September, the Korea Center for Disease Control and Prevention said.

The rate of new infections has been falling from 14.2 percent in 2004 to 11.5 percent in 2005 and 10.4 percent last year.

But experts cautioned the real number of HIV/AIDS infections would be much higher as South Korea has a strong social prejudice against the disease.

"Fixing the social prejudice is almost as urgent as fighting the disease itself," said professor O Myung-don of the Seoul National University Hospital.

Chinese Health Minister Chen Zhu (陳竺) earlier raised the estimate of the number of HIV/AIDS cases in China to about 700,000.

To raise awareness of the disease UNAIDS and the China Red Cross Foundation have organized the "Great AIDS Walk" on the Great Wall today.

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