UNAIDS (Joint United Nations Programme on HIV and AIDS) has presented a special award to Serge Dumont for his contributions to AIDS prevention and awareness. The awards ceremony took place on September 17th, 2008. Chinese basketball star Yao Ming and Tsinghua Professor Li Xiguang also received the award.

Dr. Peter Piot hopes awarding outstanding individuals from the sports, business, and media circles will bring greater awareness to AIDS education and prevention.

“When it comes to saving lives for people who are already affected with HIV/AIDS, you need treatment, doctors and nurses. But when it comes to saving lives through prevention, journalists, communicators can save more lives than doctors, because it is about communication, about education,” said Dr. Piot.

Serge Dumont is a successful businessman, an AIDS activist and UNAIDS Special Representative. He reminded people who attended the ceremony that AIDS is a constant problem that needs constant public attention.

“The AIDS crisis is an ongoing crisis, the public always has a tendency to have a focus on an immediate crisis. When you have a tsunami, you focus on the thousands of deaths … The problem is staying interested in an ongoing crisis that is happening everyday.” Serge Dumont said.

AIDS work in China has in the past 5 years been strengthened significantly by the increasing mobilization of various non-health sectors such as private business and the media. However, much remains to be done.

A recent survey supported by UNAIDS found that 65 percent of the surveyed adult population were unwilling to live in the same household as a person living with HIV. Nearly 50 percent thought mistakenly that HIV can be transmitted through a mosquito bite.

Chinese Basketball star Yao Ming, who is currently helping reconstruction work in China’s quake-battered Sichuan Province, is among the award winners. He was awarded for his support to fighting against the discrimination of people living with HIV. Yao Ming thanked UNAIDS for the award through a video message.

“I am honored to receive this esteemed award for AIDS work. Contributing to the fight against AIDS is something that I happily do as I believe that AIDS is one of the most important global problems. We can and we should all do something to stop the spread of AIDS and the discrimination of people living with HIV.”

The third winner, Professor Li Xiguang from Tsinghua University, is a leading scholar and educator in the field of journalism and communication. He wrote many books on countering stigma and discrimination of people living with HIV.

In the past 5 years, Li opened several training camps in which journalists and people living with HIV dine, study and live together so that the media could better understand people with AIDS and avoid false perceptions.

Li said: “Journalists can make an important difference to how people think about AIDS through good reporting. False perceptions need to be overcome by communicating correct information in interesting and innovative ways.”

According to UNAIDS, about 700,000 people are living with HIV in China and more than 30 million people are estimated to be practicing risky behaviors. These include people who inject drugs, men who have sex with men, sex workers, and clients of sex workers.