The UNAIDS/World Health Organization joint report said that the estimated 36.1 million people who will have the HIV virus or AIDS by the end of the year was 50 percent higher than the figure the WHO projected in 1991.In all regions except sub-Saharan Africa, more men have been hit by AIDS than women, the report also said, blaming male behavior and cultural notions of masculinity for the trend. As a result, UNAIDS has this year launched a special campaign to alter such behavior.

The report also revealed that the AIDS epidemic is exploding in the former Soviet bloc, with the number of cases of HIV infection soaring to 700,000, compared with 420,000 just a year ago.

UNAIDS executive director Peter Piot said most of the new infections were among users of injected drugs, while other contributing factors included a rise in prostitution due to increased poverty and the collapse of health and social services.

Piot said the increase could be seen from Estonia on the Baltic to Uzbekistan in Central Asia, but said the situation was particularly dramatic in Russia, where new infections have been more numerous this year than in all previous years combined.

By the end of the year the number of HIV-infected people in Russia was expected to have more than doubled to 300,000, from an estimated 130,000 at the end of 1999, he said.

Piot said there were some three million users of the injected drug in heroin in Russia. But he said there was still an opportunity to prevent a major catastrophe in Eastern Europe. A key step was recognition by governments that the effect could be as dramatic as economic crisis or civil war.

Piot said the situation in sub-Saharan Africa remained "catastrophic" as the world's most-affected region and that there the epidemic was "bound to get worse before it gets better".

The report said an estimated 3.8 million people became infected with the AIDS-causing virus in sub-Saharan Africa during the last year, compared with four million new infections in the region in 1999.This brought the number of people with HIV or suffering from AIDS in the region to 25.3 million. At the same time 2.4 million people died of AIDS in Africa this year, according to the report.

But Piot noted that parts of sub-Saharan Africa are now showing stable or reduced rates of infection. The report says this may be due to better prevention programmes, such as in Uganda, or simply because there are now fewer people left in at-risk groups.

Piot also said that apparently stabilized rates of infection such as in Kenya were still a "very relative" gain, and that there were "reasons to expect" a rise in infection in Nigeria.

The report also stresses the sharp economic and social impact of the AIDS epidemic in Africa through its decimation of work forces or teachers.

Coinciding with the report, the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) called on governments, industry and public opinion in both the developed and underdeveloped world to give massive support to an AIDS-awareness campaign among young people.

Young people in particular are threatened by the world epidemic, and they hold the key to fighting the spread of the disease, UNICEF executive director Carol Bellamy said in Berlin.

UNICEF said studies show prevention campaigns are working in some of the worst-hit African countries: both in Uganda and Zambia awareness programmes had greatly helped reduce the rate of infection among young people.

Bellamy challenged AIDS-ravaged countries to devote more resources, energy and creativity to using schools in the battle against the epidemic.

"Schools give the state a unique capacity in nearly every family, in every community, every day," she said. People aged between 15 to 24 account for nearly a third of all people living with HIV infection or AIDS, but young people are more open to changing their behavior, Bellamy said.

(China Daily 11/29/2000)