World AIDS Day
Over one million people worldwide are expected to ring bells for one minute on Thursday evening as part of an Israeli-led awareness campaign to mark World AIDS Day.
The Bells 4 AIDS event, spearheaded by the Jerusalem AIDS Project, is scheduled for 8 P.M. GMT on December 1.
"We’re requesting something simple. Gather together and ring a bell at the designated time - any bell. It could be a school bell, church bell, or fire department bell. Or it could be your own house bell, or your neighbor’s bell," Dr. Inon Schenker, an HIV/AIDS prevention specialist and the head of the Jerusalem AIDS Project, said in a press release.
The group has also set up an electronic bell on a Web site created for the campaign.
According to the United Nations World Health Organization, 40.3 million people worldwide are infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Of those, 4.9 million were infected in 2005. In addition to these figures, there were 3.1 million AIDS deaths in 2005. In the Middle East and North Africa, about 510,000 people are HIV positive, and and 67,000 of these, or 13 percent, were infected in 2005.
The Jerusalem AIDS Project, which sponsors training workshops in countries around the world, said they have received support for the Bells 4 AIDS campaign from all over the world.
Schenker said the Bells 4 AIDS project sprung from his group’s efforts to train Israeli backpackers traveling in developing countries as volunteer educators for AIDS prevention and awareness.
Israel is a world leader in the fight against AIDS, he said.
"I can look into the eyes of anyone and say that Israel is on the front lines of AIDS education. We were one of the first countries in the world - in 1987 - that implemented an AIDS education program in the school curriculum. And through our National Health Insurance, Israel provides medication, treatment and testing for people with HIV, free of charge. It’s part of every citizen’s medical insurance," Schenker noted in the press release.
Judges have recently called for a change in the current legislation, which allows a maximum sentence of just seven years for those who infect with AIDS maliciously. In the United States, the malicious transmission of AIDS is considered attempted murder. This call came during the November 8 sentencing of a man convicted of raping four women and infecting three of them with AIDS.
The Jerusalem AIDS Project is planning to set a new Guinness World Record in bell ringing for a public health cause with this event.
As part of other worldwide efforts on World AIDS Day to raise awareness about the disease, schoolchildren in Senegal pledged to abstain from sex and Indian village women cast off a veil of shame about their HIV status.
Anti-AIDS campaigners say science can help treat those with HIV, but that ignorance or taboos surrounding its transmission and symptoms means AIDS is hard to halt - and treat.
"The stigma is huge. And people don’t even know of treatment so they’re afraid to come out to test and know their status," said Karen Stewart, with the French aid group Doctors Without Borders.
"But we want to say to people that HIV/AIDS is not a death sentence, there is treatment, there is life after HIV," she said at a rally in Lagos, Nigeria.
By Haaretz Service and The Associated Press