Toronto: Hollywood star Richard Gere has lauded an Indian television campaign to prevent the spread of AIDS but cautioned India against repeating mistakes made by the US in its efforts to contain the epidemic.
In partnership with Star India television, 'The Heroes Project' is making tangible contributions on HIV/AIDS prevention and reaches an estimated 70 million Indian via their television sets, Gere told a news conference at the International AIDS Conference on Monday.
The Oscar-winning actor noted that if the public service campaign can keep India's rate of new infections from spiking up from the current one per cent of its population, "there's a good possibility we're not going to see 10 million or 20 million more Indians die."
Describing AIDS as the "true terrorist on the planet today," Gere said that the mistakes made by the US in the early 1980s should not be repeated in India.
"I deeply love India and I will continue to deeply love India. And it's deeply important to me that India not make the mistakes that we made in America - where we had no leadership, we didn't take it seriously and hundreds of thousands of people died who didn't have to.
"That's the reason we do this work," said Gere, whose charitable organisation supports HIV/AIDS programmes in India.
Minister of heath and family welfare, Anbumani Ramadoss, who led a 300-member delegation to the conference, said India has formulated long-term and short-term strategies to prevent and control the spread of the disease.
"We are here to learn from the experiences of other countries to make our program more effective and efficient," he said.
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