¡¡ JOHANNESBURG, July 7 (Xinhuanet) -- Former South African presidentNelson Mandela will call for increased awareness of global HIV/AIDS pandemic and support to anti-AIDS campaigns next Thursday at an international AIDS conference in Bangkok, Thailand.

    The Nobel peace prize laureate will address an estimated 15,000delegates to the 15th International AIDS Conference about his campaign "46664: Give one minute of our life to stop AIDS", the Nelson Mandela Foundation and the International AIDS Society announced here on Wednesday.

    Mandela, who turns 86 this month and announced official retirement from public life on June 1, will be in attendance at the special screening of the one-hour special on the 46664 all-star concert staged in Cape Town last year, the organizations saidin a joint statement.

    "Following the screening, he will address the assembled delegates on what more they can do to help 46664, his campaign to raise awareness of the global HIV/AIDS pandemic," said the statement.

    Mandela launched the campaign 46664, his former prisoner numberwhen he was held in captivity for anti-apartheid activities for 18years on the Robben Island, Cape Town, to call on people to join aglobal petition to give one minute of their life to stop AIDS through listening to specially-contributed songs and making donations.

    The concert garnering domestic and international celebrities onNovember 29, 2003, also urged governments to declare a global AIDSemergency.

    A UN report said on Tuesday that 4.8 million people around the world were newly infected with HIV, the AIDS virus, last year, thehighest number in any year since the AIDS epidemic began.

    The total living with HIV/AIDS rose to 37.8 million and there were 2.9 million deaths, said the UN AIDS report released ahead ofthe international AIDS conference.

    South Africa remains as one of the hardest-hit countries aroundthe world since the United Nations estimated that 5.3 million people out of 45 million South Africans are HIV positive.

    A new research by the Actuarial Society of South Africa indicated that 330,000 South Africans would die from AIDS over thenext year, or nearly 1,000 people die every day.

    By the year 2010, between 290,000 and 450,000 people would die from AIDS depending on how fast the South African government rolled out its antiretroviral (ARV) program, according to the research.

    Pretoria has promised to put 53,000 people on ARV treatment within a year from March this year. But it has been criticized formoving too slowly.

    "The lives of those 160,000 South Africans (the difference between 290,000 and 450,000) are in government's hands. We can only hope they are not as careless with those lives as they have been with the lives of AIDS sufferers in the past," Mike Waters, aspokesman of Democratic Alliance, was quoted as saying by the South African Press Association. Enditem