Volunteers stalk HIV ignorance on a trek around India

Yet despite the encouraging news, UNAIDS director Peter Piot told reporters in New Delhi that the world needed to do much more, urgently. "The reality is that the AIDS epidemic continues to outstrip global and national efforts to contain it."

Here in India, AIDS is a problem that is still difficult to quantify. Unlike most nations of the developed world - and many nations of Africa - India does not test pregnant women during prenatal healthcare visits. Because of this, the Indian government counts only the most obvious cases of HIV, officially 5.13 million, leaving possibly hundreds of thousands, or even millions, uncounted.

What is certain is that AIDS is a growing problem in India, larger than more visible disasters like the Dec. 26 tsunami. (India's official tsunami death toll stands at 10,744). "The number of people affected [by HIV and AIDS in India] grew by over half a million last year," Dr. S.Y. Quraishi, former project director of the National AIDS Control Organization of India recently told reporters. "That's like having a tsunami every week."

Given the conservatism of some Indian villages, the AIDS walkers tailor their message to the crowd. At schools, they preach abstinence and the dangers of premarital sex. In markets, they are more explicit, talking about the dangers of unprotected sex, the danger of unclean syringes, the need for hygiene. They distribute condoms to any man who wants them. (Most do.)

Few women approach the marchers - who are all men - to hear such information, so the AIDS Walk reaches them in other ways, sending a mobile clinic to more remote villages, offering counseling and medical treatment, free of charge.

"If I go into a village speaking of sexually transmitted infections (STIs), people may not come because of the stigma, so we call it a health camp," says Dr. J. S. Ramchander Rao, the clinic doctor, who joined the walk from his home state of Andhra Pradesh. But even with such a random population, Dr. Rao says more than 50 percent of the cases he treats are either STIs or reproductive tract HIV infections.

Usha Rani, one of the two women accompanying the walkers by van, says she finds frightening levels of ignorance about HIV/AIDS. "In Rajasthan [a Western Indian state], people were asking us, 'What is AIDS? Is it a kind of food?'" says Ms. Rani.

Rani says she hopes she is giving women power at home by giving information. But she and nurse Apraise Joy also recognize that many Indian women live in male- dominated locales. "One woman came to our clinic and told us, privately, that her husband had given her an STI," says Ms. Joy. "Then her husband came to the clinic with his mother and started beating his wife."

In the Palwal market, the AIDS walkers are hamming it up. Their skits deal with men who visit brothels, and drug users. One skit follows a man, evidently in pain from a toothache, into the dentist's office.

"Doctor, my tooth hurts," says the man. The doctor looks inside the man's mouth, and pulls out a tooth. "Arghh, that was the wrong tooth," the man says.

The doctor pulls out a syringe - a massive plunger he has already used on several other patients - and the man cringes. "Is that for a buffalo or a man?"

At the end, an educator steps forward to give the moral. "AIDS doesn't spread only by sex, it also can spread through dirty needles at the doctor's office. Make sure that your doctor always uses a clean syringe."

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