Extract – Mourning and the Light | Mr. Condom’s proselytizing in Thailand

Science journalist Yanick Villedieu tells a story of AIDS, a subject he has covered since its very beginnings, nearly 40 years ago.

It is a July morning in 2004 in the din of the streets of Bangkok. Cars, motorcycles, mopeds, backfire trucks, touk-touks, these funny little three-wheelers that act as taxis, sidewalks teeming with busy passers-by: the city seems to be in turmoil. It is in this happy mess that the very media senator Mechai Viravaidya, pioneer of the prevention of AIDS in Thailand, carries out one of his favorite advertising operations: the distribution of condoms do you want some here.

Half an hour of this game and here he is three blocks away, doing the same thing, this time inside, in the offices of Krung Thai Bank; no one would dare to oppose the coming of the one everyone knows as “Monsieur Condom”. In fact, it is even hosted in the limelight. For more than ten years he has led his crusade with the same communicative enthusiasm, everywhere, not only in the streets and in office buildings, like this morning, but also in shopping malls, in cinemas, in restaurants, at gas stations. All over.

In the interview he gives me after this morning, he tells me about the genesis of these prevention campaigns: “In 1986, our government was in full denial. He did not want to bring up the subject of AIDS and he hid the statistics for fear that tourists would stop coming. However, we knew very well that the spread of the virus was going to be very rapid. ”

A few years later, in 1991, Mechai Viravaidya was called by the new prime minister to be part of his cabinet. He was made responsible for tourism and radio and television. He also asked to deal with this social problem of AIDS. He was already well acquainted with prevention issues in matters of sexual behavior: in the 1960s he founded the Population and Community Development Association to promote condom use and family planning.

“The Prime Minister has agreed to chair the national AIDS committee,” continues the senator. We were able to mobilize everyone: government, business, education. And since there was no cure for the disease, we focused on prevention. This is how education campaigns were launched in all schools, “from primary to university”. The media were also conscripted. All radio and television stations were required to broadcast a 30-second AIDS education message every hour, in return for which they were entitled to broadcast an additional 30 seconds of advertising. , which increased their income, “a beneficial situation for all parties concerned,” said Mechai Viravaidya. Film producers have also been invited to speak about AIDS in films and in soap operas.

Without forgetting, of course, the massive distribution of condoms, among others in the field of prostitution with the “100% condoms” program, which was a great success. “We even asked the police to hand out condoms in traffic jams, a program we dubbed ‘Cops and condoms.’ ”

And these education campaigns paid off in Thailand, where the first case of AIDS was discovered in 1984, no doubt because the sex trade was booming there.

In 1990, it was estimated that by letting things go, there would be four million people infected in the year 2000. There were less than one million in 2003.

Mr. Condom’s prophylactic proselytizing and prevention successes in Thailand are not unrelated to the fact that in 2004, the International AIDS Conference was held in Bangkok. During the opening ceremony on July 11, 17,000 people from 160 countries listen to speeches from a range of prestigious guests: the Prime Minister of the host country, Thaksin Shinawatra, the United Nations Secretary-General, Kofi Annan (who said of AIDS that it constitutes “a weapon of mass destruction”), and the American actor Richard Gere (who will say at a press conference that the greatest threat against humanity and against the happiness of mankind, “It’s not terrorism or bin Laden, it’s AIDS”). Even Miss Universe 2004, Australian Jennifer Hawkins, participates in the opening ceremony: after all, the AIDS pandemic is also universal.

If Bangkok was chosen to host the International AIDS Conference, it is also to draw attention to the threat hanging over Asia. Asia is half the world’s population. In countries as populous as India, where there are about five million people living with HIV, or China, which has one million, the percentages of people living with HIV are still low. But it is still very worrying. […]

The D^D Dominique Tessier, from the Montreal clinic Medisys, is a regular at these major conferences. The fact that this is taking place in Asia is for her a sign of the times: “Thailand is at the heart of the new epicenter of the epidemic that is Asia. It was among the first countries affected and it reacted quite aggressively and fairly quickly. She recognized that there was a problem and that there were things to do with sex workers, for example. She has innovated a lot in prevention. At the same time, it is a country in tropical Asia and it is grappling with other tropical diseases, including malaria, which make the HIV situation worse. ”

An infectious disease that is also taking part is tuberculosis. It is not a disease “of the past”, as one might think in developed countries. On the contrary. With the HIV-AIDS pandemic, it is currently in full swing: there has been an increase of 10% per year in Africa. It is because the AIDS virus and the tuberculosis bacillus form a formidable pair. If you are infected with HIV, you are at increased risk of catching tuberculosis, of having the active form of the disease and of seeing it progress quickly, sometimes to a fatal outcome. Tuberculosis, on the other hand, worsens HIV infection and accelerates the progression to AIDS.

Tuberculosis must therefore be treated. And treat AIDS. Access to medication is still on the menu for the meeting. This is the theme of the Bangkok conference: “Access for all”. The scandal of patients from the South who die because they cannot afford medicines from the North is far from over. Activists denounced him in 2000 in Durban. The scientific and medical community did it in turn in 2002 in Barcelona. In 2004, we begin to feel that things have started to move… slowly, it is true. WHO announces that 440,000 patients in poor countries are currently on first-line triple therapy. It is still not much: it would take at least ten times more, but it is a start.

Mourning and Light – A History of AIDS

Yanick Villedieu

Editions du Boréal, November 2021

352 pages