Prevention efforts need the world's help also, not only to stave off the torrent that has swept southward into Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana and South Africa, but also to brake its advance into Asia, where 7 million people are already infected. India is home to 4 million people with HIV, and the patterns of transmission indicate that we have no time to lose. In the Indian city of Chennai (formerly Madras), the HIV-infection rate among truck drivers quadrupled from 1995 to 1996, a haunting echo of the AIDS explosion among the African lorry drivers who travelled the highways from Nairobi to Lusaka. Also in India, studies of pregnant women in the coastal town of Pondicherry reveal 4% to be infected with HIV. Roughly a third of their infants will acquire the virus.

More than 7 million children in sub-Saharan Africa have been orphaned by AIDS, their mother or both parents having succumbed to the disease. Many of these children, like this boy in Zambia, are cared for by elderly grandparents. But tens of thousands of Zambian children are fending for themselves, many of them living on the streets.

We have learned that the crucial factor in successful prevention campaigns is the open, unwavering political commitment by each government to confront the epidemic forthrightly, to shatter the silence surrounding the virus and to prohibit discrimination of any kind. Behind the shield of silence, the stigma and shame associated with AIDS only enable this epidemic to further flourish. Nine out of 10 people in Africa with HIV do not know they are infected, and those who do know rarely tell their relatives, let alone their sex partners. Many African newspapers make no mention of AIDS in the bulging death notices.

Here in Uganda, when President Yoweri Museveni took office in 1986 he recognized the seriousness of this disease and its long-term consequences. He quickly established a national committee for AIDS prevention, which launched an intensive public education campaign based on catchy messages to attract our young people. Among other things, it encouraged condom distribution, voluntary HIV testing, counselling and support services. And even more important, it encouraged frank, public debate.

With its slogan 'Faithfulness, abstinence, condoms', our AIDS-prevention campaign has made remarkable progress. Many Ugandans are now postponing their first sexual experiences, taking fewer partners and using condoms more often. We have seen the rate of new infections among our people drop dramatically since the dark year of 1987, when we had 239,000 new cases of HIV/AIDS. By 1997, this figure had declined by more than three quarters, to 57,000. We are especially encouraged by the 40% drop in HIV prevalence among pregnant women in urban areas - an important indicator for tracking the spread of the disease.

But we are not alone. Worlds away in South-East Asia, government officials and community advocates in Thailand have likewise been successful with their aggressive campaign to prevent the spread of AIDS. Warned by the catastrophic losses in Africa, Thai officials attacked their HIV epidemic at an earlier stage and particularly targeted their young population with their messages. As a result, in northern Thailand, the number of 21-year-old men who visited commercial sex workers dropped by half during the course of four years. Condom use increased by nearly 50 per cent, and only one third as many HIV infections were reported during that time.

A third country, Senegal, has also managed to stem the spread of the virus through a vigorous education programme aimed at young people. Among women and men under the age of 25, the use of condoms with 'non-regular' partners rose dramatically from only 5% in 1990 to as high as 60% in 1997.

These programmes may be only the first step, but they prove the point made by Dr. Peter Piot, the Executive Director of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), that prevention efforts "[do] not require new breakthroughs in technology, but rather new break-throughs in political will."

These efforts must be targeted at the most vulnerable - young people, women and children. And they must firmly guarantee people their rights to education, health, economic livelihood — to life itself — so that, armed with knowledge and independence, our people can avoid HIV infection in the first place.

Years from now, when our great-grandchildren look back on the twilight of this century, will they learn that the leaders of the world shirked their duty to fight the leading killer of young people?

We cannot let that happen. Instead, let us show that we boldly reached out to the women and children most threatened by the pandemic and empowered them to defeat this terrible disease.

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