In the past several years, the chorus of praise has been replaced by caution that Thailand is risking a relapse as the government has been lulled into complacency by its past success. Prevention programmes, which emphasise education aimed at reducing the risk associated with attitudes and lifestyles, have been given less and less funding.

This year, the budget set aside by the government for a national HIV/Aids awareness campaign amounts to only Bt20 million, a sharp reduction from last year's Bt50 million. Much of this money has been diverted to local governments as part of the process to decentralise administrative power. The problem is that most of the public education initiatives carried out by local government agencies are done so unprofessionally and considered much less effective than centrally-planned public education measures. The government of Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont must make sure that any boost in the budget for HIV/Aids prevention and education campaigns for local governments is not made at the expense of similar programmes at the national level.

Last year, UNAids said: "Public information, which was once ubiquitous, has dropped off the radar screen... Thailand must revive the flagging HIV/Aids awareness programmes to reach out to a new generation of young people, who currently see the virus as a problem largely affecting their elders. They are clearly vulnerable to infection with HIV."

The Public Health Ministry predicts that there will be about 14,000 new HIV/Aids cases this year, which would mean a total of 1.1 people will have been diagnosed with HIV/Aids in this country since the virus was first reported in Thailand in 1984. Half of those people have since died. The ministry has set an ambitious target for itself: to reduce the projected new cases of HIV/Aids by half this year, while also ensuring that at least 80 per cent of those already infected have access to adequate medical services. There will be a particular focus on ensuring that they have access to affordable drug treatment, which will enable many of them to lead a decent life.

As of December 2005, about 540,000 infected people required continuing care and treatment. Among those infected were some 50,000 children born to HIV-positive mothers.

Some of the prevailing trends are worrying, particularly increases in teenage girls contracting HIV through unprotected sex, housewives being infected by their unfaithful spouses and male homosexuals contracting the disease through unsafe sex. Health workers have expressed concern that premarital sex has become commonplace among sexually active teenagers and young adults and that most of them do not use condoms consistently.

This should serve as a wake-up call for Thai public health authorities. Thailand's past success does not guarantee its future performance and no single strategy that has worked in the past can be expected to deliver a similar outcome, given the evolving patterns of how HIV/Aids spreads among different demographic groups.

Unlike in the past, people can no longer be categorised neatly into so-called high-risk groups, because the attitude toward sex in Thai society has changed dramatically from just a few decades ago. Virtually all sexually active people - regardless of social or economic background - who do not practise safe sex consistently can be susceptible to contracting HIV/Aids from their sex partners.

Thailand's campaign against HIV/Aids was probably also compromised by the prolonged political crisis of last year that led to the overthrow of former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra in a coup. The political uncertainty, which has continued to persist even after the military-installed Surayud government took over, must not be allowed to cloud the government's judgement about the pressing issue of HIV/Aids, which must remain one of the country's top priorities.