World AIDS Day observed in Asia despite taboos

World AIDS Day observed in Asia despite taboos

HONG KONG (Reuter): Asians marked World AIDS Day yesterday
with calls to halt the spread of the epidemic, but experts warned
that a lack of education and sexual taboos ensure the killer
disease will continue to run rampant in the region.

Two, 18-meter high red ribbons, the symbol of international
AIDS awareness, adorned the Sydney Harbor Bridge in Australia
while thousands of people in Thailand distributed condoms at
massage parlors and even petrol stations.

In Manila, 500 members of HIV/AIDS Network Philippines
released hundreds of red balloons marked with the words "World
AIDS Day" while awareness groups in Tokyo opened a round-the-
clock telephone counseling service in eight languages and hot
lines for Japanese women and homosexuals.

As many remembered the dead and dying, health experts in
India, the world's second most populous nation, warned the most
horrific toll may still be to come.

The number of people infected with the HIV (human
immunodeficiency virus) in India will explode in four years,
dwarfing the current level of about five million cases, an expert
with the Indian Health Organization said yesterday. HIV causes
AIDS.

"By the turn of the century, this is likely to go up to 20
million in a best-case scenario and 50 million in a worst case
scenario," said I.H. Gilada, the organization's secretary-
general.

Indian officials says widespread prostitution is responsible
for spreading the virus but the IHO assigns part of the blame to
official apathy.

"There has not been enough official attention given to AIDS,"
Gilada said. "People are suddenly waking up now that the
situation looks like it's getting out of control."

The forecasts are equally grim for other developing Asian
countries.

The World Health Organization estimates that nearly 28 million
people have been infected worldwide with HIV since the start of
the epidemic 15 years ago.

But while HIV infection rates are dropping in Europe and the
U.S., health experts warn that HIV is mushrooming in Asia.

About 800,000 Thais have been infected and that number is
expected to rise to over one million by 2000, the Thai Health
Ministry has said.

Up to a million people in Indonesia and 300,000 people in
Vietnam are expected to be infected with HIV by 2000.

Despite yesterday's events, efforts to educate Asia's masses
on the disease are being held back by poor health education and
cultural or religious taboos against open discussion of sex or
the use of condoms.

In mainly Moslem Indonesia, where up to one million people are
expected to catch HIV by 2000, the government has said Moslem
sensitivities do not allow it to promote condom use to combat
AIDS.

The use of contraceptives is also a sensitive issue in Moslem
Malaysia and Brunei and predominantly Roman Catholic Philippines.

Prudish sexual attitudes and misconceptions also work against
AIDS education efforts in Chinese society, where AIDS is viewed
as a "foreign disease".

At an AIDS expo in Beijing yesterday, a manufacturer displayed
a toilet seat with an automatic protective covering, saying it
would help prevent the spread of sexually transmitted disease, a
myth long dispelled in the west.

Even in cosmopolitan Hong Kong, sex education is virtually
non-existent in classrooms.

A recent survey found that about 60 percent of 14-year-old
girls in the colony thought they could contract AIDS from kissing
or from toilet seats, and few teenagers knew the facts about
contraception, sexually transmitted diseases or abortion.

"All this is very gloomy but there is some reason for hope,"
Dr Peter Piot, executive director of UNAIDS, the joint UN program
on AIDS and HIV, said recently.

He said studies showed treating sexually transmitted diseases
could greatly cut HIV infection rates, and that education efforts
in Thailand, for example, had cut infection among army recruits.
But he warned the problem will get much worse before it gets
better.