December

	World AIDS Day
	[ 1st December ]

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World AIDS Day or the Red Ribbon Day is important because AIDS is a communicable disease and awareness helps to slow the spread and encourages the victims to get support.

In India, the predominant mode of transmission is through heterosexual intercourse (74.1%) followed by injectable drug use (7.0%) and transfusion of infected blood and blood products (8.0%). So if you think AIDS has got something to do with homosexuals only, then you have another think coming.

For every thousand people screened in India 22.1 have been found to be seropositive. As of July 1998, 78,904 of the 3.3 million high risk and suspected AIDS cases screened were found to be positive.

	World Disabled Day
	[ 3rd December ]

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One in every 30 Indian has a limb, auditory, visual or other impairment.

India manufactures artificial limbs of good quality at low costs. Dubbed the "Jaipur Foot", Dr Pramod Karan Sethi's hospital, which is in the vanguard of this effort, successfully fits artificial limbs each year for many limb impaired individuals.

	Human Rights Day
	[ 10th December ]

All pigs are equal. But some pigs are more equal than others, proclaims the pig-in-charge in George Orwell's keen satire, Animal Farm. Every society has treated some members as less equal. Some had outcasts, some slaves, some discriminated on grounds of race or colour. Colonial powers treated subject peoples as lesser mortals. Even in apparently advanced and homogenous societies biases existed. For instance, until 1971 women were not allowed to vote in Switzerland!.

One of the first things the United Nations Organisation vowed to do was to foster universal respect for observance of human rights and fundamental freedom for all without distinction as to race, language or religion.

You might think that this is just another officious observance, but if you read the Human Rights Declaration you will know that so many rights (natural and those granted by the government) are not available to large sections of people, even in India. The charter details all the political and civil rights, social, cultural and economic rights a human being can claim.