Activists sought Saturday Dec. 1st 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 daily kills some 6,000 people.
Chinese President Hu Jintao 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 are at risk of contracting HIV/AIDS.
December 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 AIDS awareness educator Vince Lovegrove, calling for a new campaign aimed at a new generation.
Government figures show that by the end of 2006, 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.
The agency 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 in 2007 from 3.0 million in the late 1990s.
Meanwhile, the agonising effort to bring antiretroviral drugs to Africa, where more than two-thirds of the people with HIV/AIDS live, is now bearing fruit.
At the end of 2006, more than two million people were getting the vital pills, a 54 percent increase over the previous year, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).
Source :- http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5hH418CnikKLe7eFfNrrpj
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