PARIS, Dec 1: The world’s most powerful leaders and most vulnerable rag-swaddled children were united for World AIDS Day on Sunday in their calls for action to stem the spread of the ravaging epidemic that has struck scores of millions across the globe.

Marchers from Kathmandu to Rome rallied in support of health care for the stricken, while activists in South Africa symbolized the tragedy of HIV-infected children by burying the remains of 17 babies who died of AIDS-related illnesses.

As several thousand trooped through rain in Paris in a march organized by the AIDS advocacy group Act Up!, French President Jacques Chirac called for governments to “mobilize, in terms of information, prevention, in terms of treatment and in integrating victims into society”.

Former US president Bill Clinton also weighed in on the epidemic by lashing out at world governments for not doing more to provide access to treatment for the 42 million people with AIDS or HIV.

“Withholding of treatment will appear to future historians as medieval, like bloodletting,” he wrote in an opinion piece in the New York Times on Sunday to mark the 15th annual observance of the UN-backed worldwide event.

Poor, female, drug-addicted, or infant — but, above all, stigmatized. The terms, often used to describe infection trends, cross all cultural and geographical boundaries, activists said.

More than 2,000 people in Hanoi called for discrimination against Vietnamese AIDS sufferers to end.

India, which with an estimated four million HIV-infected individuals, second only to South Africa in terms of absolute numbers of sufferers of the disease, was also the stage for calls to stop stigmatizing and start treating the sick.

In the eastern city of Bhubaneswar more than 100,000 people, including HIV sufferers, scribbled messages on a six-kilometre banner.

“It has been a rare show of solidarity to fight AIDS and we have to take it forward,” a spokesman for the organizers said.

Jahnabi Goswami, the first woman in northeastern Assam state to publicly declare her HIV status, told thousands at another rally: “Society at large is very cruel to people living with AIDS.”

In China and Iran, two countries that long ignored AIDS education at their own peril, World AIDS Day elicited public awareness actions.

Activity in Beijing included testimony by AIDS patients and the announcement of a new rural AIDS education programme.

On Saturday, 1,000 villagers from the outskirts of Beijing gathered to watch the premier of a television documentary on HIV/AIDS prevention, which will be aired nationwide to half the country’s 1.3 billion people.

In what is widely considered an underestimation of the extent of the problem, China has acknowledged one million cases of AIDS and HIV, up from 600,000 last year.

The UN has suggested that the real number is closer to 1.5 million, but could soar to more than 10 million in China by the end of the decade.

Tehran, slowly breaking down the taboos associated with the disease, announced earlier that to mark World AIDS Day the government would distribute educational brochures directed at half-a-million state officials and teachers.

Roughly 65 percent of Iran’s 20,000-30,000 HIV-infected people — according to official numbers — are intravenous drug addicts.—AFP