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Youths Targeted for AIDS Prevention Drive
A senior official of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) has urged China to stress HIV/AIDS prevention among youths.
"The HIV/AIDS pandemic puts a new threat, with consequences for children around the globe as devastating to humankind and as potentially long-lasting as any war in history," Edwin Joseph Judd, UNICEF area representative for China and Mongolia, said Thursday.
Judd praised China for its role in a UNICEF-backed Mekong sub-regional HIV/AIDS prevention and control project that was established in Southwest China's Yunnan Province. It focused on providing young people with accurate information about HIV/AIDS.
However, efforts to inform people, especially youths, about HIV/AIDS must be pursued "with far greater energy," Judd said.
"The cost of inaction is too high for our children to pay with the lives of their parents, their teachers, and their own lives," he added.
Judd's remarks came when UNICEF's annual report - the Progress of Nations 2000 - was unveiled in Kunming, capital city of Yunnan.
The report records the devastating speed with which HIV/AIDS has, in less than a generation, become the deadliest threat confronting Africa, and is now spreading in Asia and parts of Central Europe and Latin America.
In China, 18,143 HIV infections were reported as of the end of March. They include 670 full-blown AIDS cases. There may be more than 500,000 HIV infections in the country, said Shen Jie, a division chief of the Disease Control Department of the Ministry of Health.
Nearly 80 per cent of the HIV carriers in China are 20 to 40 years old and nearly 10 per cent are under 19, UNICEF sources said.
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