by Griffin SheaSun May 6, 11:14 PM ET
Hanging on the wall of a
popular Bangkok restaurant is a portrait of Mechai Viravaidya wearing a
Superman outfit, his red underpants outside his blue tights and a giant
yellow "C" emblazoned across his chest.
On closer inspection, it becomes clear the portrait is not that of the
comic book superstar after all but a real-life Thai hero -- "The Real
Mr Condom," a character Mechai invented as part of his fabulously
successful campaign to raise awareness of HIV and AIDS among his countrymen.
Unlikely as it may sound, this picture of the man whose name has become
synonymous with "condom" in Thailand, is among the more subtle of
the displays filling Mechai's restaurant and its tropical garden courtyard
tucked down a lane in the bustling capital.
The restaurant is called Cabbages and Condoms, and was opened to raise
money for AIDS prevention projects. It's named after Mechai's belief that
condoms should be as easily available -- and as easy to discuss -- as
cabbages, a staple in Thai kitchens and cuisine.
The restaurant's courtyard is filled with trees draped in fairy lights
and a small waterfall, and sometimes a musician plays the traditional Thai
xylophone known as a ranad.
But look closely at the bouquets of flowers and the petals are made of
condoms, as are the lampshades. Mannequins nearby are dressed in clothes
made out of packets of condoms and birth control pills.
And as Mechai sits down to talk, his staff produce a stuffed teddy bear
and a cat, both made of snipped condoms instead of plush.
These are just some of the ways that Mechai has dreamed up over the last
three decades of using humour -- and unlikely condom creations -- to erase
the stigma surrounding talk of sex in Thailand.
His efforts have been so successful that his name has become slang for
"condom" in Thai -- it was intended as an insult the first time a
newspaper called a condom a "mechai," but he wears it as a badge
of pride.
Mechai's campaigns are widely credited first with reining in Thailand's
population growth in the 1970s, and then with preventing HIV from stampeding
across the country in the 1990s.
"It was praised as the best programme in the world," Mechai
says of his AIDS prevention campaign. "Everyone was involved, every
ministry -- education was involved, business was involved, religion was
involved, everyone."
But a decade after life-prolonging drugs first appeared and transformed
perceptions of AIDS, Mechai says Thailand's prevention efforts have been
waning, leading to fears that infections could rise, especially among the
young.
"You've heard the saying, winning the battle and losing the war. Now
this may happen in Thailand," he says.
"We have seen a 90 percent decline in infections. Terrific. It's
just that now it's beginning to turn up again. Over the last three years,
public education in Thailand by the Ministry for Public Health has almost
been zilch.
"Younger generations are now saying, is AIDS still around? We
thought it was gone. That's why we're not using condoms anymore. It's
entirely tragic. We've done it, and now we just let it fall, fall
back," he says.
"It's not a matter of not knowing what to do. We know what to do.
We've done it. We've achieved great success, now it's falling backwards, and
it's just unbelievable."
And that's why, more than a decade after Mechai was Thailand's public
health minister, he's been called back to duty as the government's
"AIDS czar" to devise a new prevention campaign, focussing
specifically on young people who missed out on the original message about
safe sex.
Thailand stands out as one of the few bright spots in the world's battle
against HIV, although it remains one of the hardest-hit countries in Asia.
Some 1.4 percent of the adult population is infected with HIV, according
to UNAIDS. Since the first case was detected here in 1984, more than one
million Thais have been infected and more than 400,000 have died.
But the World Bank estimated in a report last year that if Thailand had
not pursued such an effective prevention campaign since the 1990s, 7.7
million more people would have been infected.
The United Nations calls Thailand an "early achiever" in
meeting its Millennium Development Goal of halting and beginning to reverse
the spread of the epidemic by 2015.
In 1990, Thailand had 143,000 new infections, but UNAIDS says the number
now is about one-tenth of that.
Much of the credit for that turnaround lies with Mechai, who used the
force of his dynamic personality to change both government policy and public
perceptions.
He was born in Bangkok in 1941, the son of a Scottish mother and a Thai
father, both doctors who instilled in him the importance of public service.
As a young development economist working for Thailand's government,
Mechai became famous while moonlighting as a television actor starring in
soap operas adapted from popular novels.
He also had a successful radio show and a newspaper column, experiences
that helped him learn how to use media to get out a message.
He left government service after just a few years to stage an
unsuccessful bid for parliament, and then went on to form his own NGO, which
is now the Population and Community Development Association.
When he first started promoting birth control in the 1970s, most of the
educational materials were staid brochures that avoided referring directly
to either condoms or sex.
But when Mechai started talking about sex, he used his star power to draw
in crowds, and then used his humour and stage skills to pull in listeners in
a way that no one had done before.
Mechai passed out condoms to everyone he saw, and then encouraged people
to blow them into balloons.
"The availability or possession of a product doesn't govern one's
behaviour. We have knives in our kitchens, but we are not all killers. The
condom is really clean if your mind isn't dirty," he said during one of
his early workshops, according to a biography of him called "From
Condoms to Cabbages".
Mechai glued condoms to business cards and put them on key chains. He set
up family planning "supermarkets" at bus stations to sell
contraceptives as well as more novel items, such as lace panties carrying
the motto "Too many children make you poor."
He enlisted traffic cops to pass out condoms on New Year's Eve, in a
scheme that became known as "Cops and Rubbers".
At his request, Buddhist monks blessed batches of condoms. In rural areas
with limited access to media, he hired farmers to spray-paint condom ads on
their cows.
When AIDS began threatening Thailand in the 1980s, the government was
initially afraid of publicly battling the disease, in part for fear of
scaring off visitors and threatening the vital tourism industry.
At the time, the government actively promoted Thailand's famed red light
districts, and authorities feared sexually transmitted diseases like AIDS
would put off tourists.
Mechai argued that tourists would want the reassurance of knowing that
Thailand was tackling the disease head on. In 1991, he was asked to join the
prime minister's cabinet, where he made his campaign part of national
policy.
He used equally dramatic but simple stunts to ease the social stigma
surrounding HIV. Once he called a press conference merely to be photographed
drinking from the same glass as someone with AIDS, to make the point that
the disease cannot be spread through simple social contact.
While prevention efforts grew steadily throughout the 1990s, the
government's focus changed as new drugs became available to treat the
disease.
Thailand's treatment programme has been hailed by the World Bank as an
international model, providing drugs to 90 percent of the people who need
them and resulting in a dramatic drop in the number of AIDS deaths.
Between January and November 2004, nearly 6,600 people died from AIDS.
During the same period of 2005, the number of deaths dropped below 1,500.
In recent months, Thailand has also proved willing to battle Western
pharmaceuticals manufacturers to extract lower prices by invoking
little-used rules under the World Trade Organisation to make its own
generics.
The tactic succeeded in winning concessions from the drug companies to
cut their own prices.
Even though the overall picture is encouraging, what worries campaigners
like Mechai is changing behaviour among Thai youth who missed out on the
campaigns of the 1990s.
In recent years, army conscripts -- mostly 21-year-old men who are
drafted for mandatory military service -- have shown a growing tendency to
visit prostitutes while becoming less likely to use condoms.
The shift is worrying because the behaviour of the conscripts is believed
to mirror that of young men generally.
HIV remains alarmingly common among Thai sex workers, creating a threat
that the epidemic could push its way back into the general population.
The Ministry of Public Health acknowledges that prevention efforts have
slacked off.
"In the last three years, the government let each ministry set up
its own budget for AIDS prevention, but it was a very low priority,"
health minister Mongkol Na Songkhla says.
The budget for prevention was 50 million baht in 2004, but dropped to 20
million baht (570,000 dollars) in 2006.
Mechai's appointment in early April as the new AIDS czar seems to
indicate a new commitment to prevention.
"The government has obviously realised that we've got to do
something," he said. "If we go the way we've been doing things,
we're going to be clobbered."
And his formula for turning things around is simple: condoms, condoms,
condoms.
Mechai says abstinence campaigns like those championed by US President
George W. Bush's administration just don't work.
"We're not trying to prevent sex, like Bush. No one's been able to
do that in the history of the world," he says.
