PARIS, Dec 1: Rallies and media campaigns around the world forced the AIDS scourge back into the international limelight on World AIDS Day Saturday in a bid to maintain awareness of the disease and its dangers.

In South Africa, officially the world’s most AIDS infected country with some 4.7 million people diagnosed HIV positive, former president Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu joined government ministers at awareness rallys.

In Pretoria traditional healers spoke out against myths which have taken hold, including one that having sex with a virgin will cure AIDS.

In Zimbabwe hundreds banged drums and sang at a Harare rally.

In the Ivory Coast capital Abidjan President Laurent Gbagbo received thousands of demonstrators and his wife ceremonially presented him with a condom to demonstrate awareness in a country where one million out of 15 million are HIV positive.

Across Asia, governments and activists alike pushed the message, still apparently unheeded by many Asians, that unprotected sex and needle-sharing can kill.

China was scheduled to broadcast its first televised AIDS awareness programme.

In India, with an estimated five million HIV and AIDS cases, the publicity drive centred on drug addicts passing on the disease by sharing needles.

In Rome Pope John Paul II said the Roman Catholic Church backed scientists fighting AIDS.

Gro Harlem Brundtland, head of the World Health Organisation (WHO), struck an optimistic note about the fight against AIDS, saying the world was now ready to stop the HIV/AIDS epidemic in its tracks.

But latest statistics still told a grim tale. The International Red Cross reminded the world at least five million grandparents in Africa had gone back to being parents as a result of HIV/AIDS. Some 12 million children in the continent have lost one or both parents.

A UN report showed HIV or AIDS cases in Asia and the Pacific had reached 7.1 million, with a staggering 1.07 million adults and children newly infected with HIV in 2001.

The UN refugee agency UNHCR reminded the world vulnerable populations including refugees were increasingly hit by HIV/AIDS. “Women and girls frequently find themselves coerced into sex to gain access to basic needs such as food, shelter and security,” it said.

A study commissioned by UNHCR in 1999 in refugee camps in Tanzania showed that some youngsters begin to have sex at the age of 10, and raised concerns about issues such as multiple partners, unprotected sex and the exchange of sex with older males for gifts.

It is estimated that 2,000 people die of AIDS related disease very week in Zimbabwe, and six of the capital’s seven cemeteries are reported full because of the soaring death rate.

In Rome Pope John Paul 11 said the Roman Catholic Church backed scientists fighting AIDS. In a message to victims, he said: “The Church is at the side of scientists and encourages all those who work tirelessly to cure and hold in check this grave infirmity.”

In one of the most high profile interventions, WHO chief Gro Harlem Brundtland struck an optimistic note, saying the world was now ready to stop the HIV/AIDS epidemic in its tracks. But she warned the fight would be long.

“Over the past year we have seen the start of a real change,” Brundtland said: governments around the world had started to apply a new openness in confronting the HIV/AIDS epidemic and its devastation of their people.

“Prices of life-saving medicines for those living with HIV, including anti-retrovirals, have been greatly reduced,” she said in a written statement.

Developing countries’ ability to take advantage of the flexibility of the World Trade Organisation’s agreement on patent protection was reaffirmed by trade ministers in Doha, Qatar, last month, she pointed out.

And new funds are starting to become available.

Brundtland highlighted the Global Fund for AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis which she described as a “groundbreaking mechanism” for bringing together the public and private sectors, plus non-governmental organisations.

“The world is now ready to turn back the epidemic learning from those who have blazed a trail, scaling up best practice and confronting AIDS systematically,” she said.

“It will be a long fight.”

The NGO Doctors of the World said it was making the anti-AIDS battle one of its priorities for the next five years.

It said that it would particularly fight in less developed countries and among poor people in industrialised countries who it judges are particularly vulnerable.—AFP