JOHANNESBURG (Dec. 1) - Millions of people around the globe marked World AIDS
Day on Sunday with marches, prayers and hope amid grim statistics which show
the raging epidemic outpacing all efforts to control it.

In China, officials instructed one million students to launch a new national
AIDS awareness campaign; in Britain, health experts warned of a startling
spike in new infections, and in South Africa -- the country worst hit by the
disease -- they held a mass funeral for babies.

"We pay tribute to all the children who have passed away in our care," said
Jackie Schoeman of the Cotlands Baby Sanctuary, which held a ceremony on
Sunday in Johannesburg to inter the cremated ashes of some of the littlest
victims.

Sunday's World AIDS Day activities highlight how dangerously the disease has
spread since it was first detected among homosexual men in the United States
in 1981.

Estimates released by the United Nations last week indicate that more than 40
million people worldwide are infected with HIV, the virus which causes AIDS,
the vast majority of them in sub-Saharan Africa.

AIDS will have killed 3.1 million people by the end of this year, while five
million more will have been infected, UNAIDS said in its report.

Ominously, the virus appears to be both spreading into regions which could
transform the epidemic into a truly global disaster and has a frightening
ability to evolve and adapt, developing resistance to AIDS-fighting drugs and
complicating the quest for a vaccine.

Eastern Europe and Central Asia, with 1.2 million cases, now show the fastest
growing epidemics, while officials fear that China and India are AIDS time
bombs.

WOMEN VICTIMS

Already an estimated one million Chinese are infected with HIV and unless
effective responses take hold, the number could reach 10 million people --
equivalent to the entire population of Belgium -- by the end of this decade,
the U.N. report says.

Worldwide, half of those infected are now women, the report says, meaning
more babies could become infected through their mothers and eliminating
female caregivers in populations which have already seen many of their male
breadwinners perish.

To see what damage AIDS can do, one has only to look at southern Africa,
where almost 30 million people are already infected with the disease.

Food output is falling, due to drought and the fact that agricultural workers
are dying. Millions of children have been orphaned by the disease. Cemetery
space is running out, average life expectancy is falling and billions of
dollars are being chopped out the region's already fragile economies.

"There is no longer a distinction between those living with HIV/AIDS and
those who are not," South African Deputy President Jacob Zuma said in the
government's official World AIDS Day speech on Sunday. "We are all living
with the disease and are affected by it in many ways."

Many of Sunday's AIDS Day activities focused on three major areas of concern
as the epidemic takes hold.

Treatment, now limited to expensive and complicated cocktails of
anti-retroviral drugs, reaches only a tiny handful of AIDS sufferers who need
it.

SOCIAL TABOOS

Fear and prejudice stalk victims of the disease, who are often ostracized
from community support networks at their moment of greatest need. And
awareness of the disease lags, despite massive efforts to educate people
about how it is transmitted and how to avoid it.

China, long criticized for its sluggish response to the threat, launched a
new round of awareness and prevention campaigns on Sunday, taking on social
taboos on talking about sexual activities in public.

At Beijing's Great Hall of the People, China's political center, the
government launched a national campaign for students to spread out into the
countryside to educate people about the disease and denounce discrimination
against sufferers.

In a sign that developed countries may be in for another AIDS shock after
seeing new cases decline in recent years, British officials said this week
that the country was likely to have a 20 percent increase in new HIV cases
this year -- a number twice that reported at the end of the 1990s.

"We are moving in the wrong direction and that is extremely worrying," said
Dr. Barry Evans, a health expert at the Public Health Laboratory Service
which monitors infectious disease.

Officials point to some hopeful signs, including some successful AIDS
awareness campaigns in Africa and moves by drug companies to slash the price
of anti-AIDS drugs.

But treatment, even when it is available, is always going to be the most
expensive option. UNAIDS calculates that by 2007 the world will have to find
about $15 billion a year to successfully treat and combat AIDS in low and
middle income countries -- but contributions to the new Global Fund designed
to spearhead anti-AIDS work are lagging.

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton marked World AIDS Day on Sunday by urging
greater efforts to treat victims of the disease, saying prevention and
education were not enough.

"We can and must do more to stop the spread of AIDS by doing more to treat
people who already have it," Clinton said in an article in the New York
Times. "Now that we have the medical capacity to save and improve the lives
of millions of people, there is no other moral or practical choice."

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