Talking about sex is virtually taboo in Pakistan’s male-dominated conservative Islamic society, so for a woman openly to declare herself HIV positive is to invite controversy.

But that is what Shukriya Gul, a 34-year-old widowed mother of two, has done since discovering she was infected with the virus almost 10 years ago.

Gul is not from the well-educated, privileged minority that produces many able and articulate Pakistani women who champion social causes across the country. She works as a beautician.

Her mission in life is to raise her son and daughter while waging a community-based campaign to raise AIDS awareness in a country ill-prepared to meet the threat of the disease.

“In 1995 I was diagnosed HIV positive,” Gul said, calmly recalling the time her life changed irreversibly.

She caught it from her husband, who died in 1995 after being infected by tainted blood during a transfusion following a road accident while working in Kenya.

“I have two children, but by the Grace of God they are negative,” she said.

Told there was no cure and unable to afford drugs marketed in the West, Gul knew her children’s future depended on her refusal to surrender to fate.

“I had to raise them and for that I needed information which I did not have either before being diagnosed or after,” she said. “We had not been briefed on what is HIV or AIDS.”

So she travelled across the country in search of information on the virus - and the more she discovered, the more she tried to pass on to others.

Inevitably she ran into barriers. Determined to fight, and reassured that the virus was not spread through touch, she faced her friends and family and found other HIV carriers to form a counselling service.

Information about HIV and AIDS in Pakistan is scant - not just in rural areas - and even the government has only rough figures for how many people may be infected.

For the first time on Wednesday, the virus was given prominence by Pakistan’s media as part of a national effort to promote understanding on World AIDS Day. Almost all newspapers ran advertisements or features on AIDS and how to prevent it. Several television news channels held talk shows or programmes to highlight AIDS.

The incidence of AIDS in Pakistan is considered low compared with neighbouring countries and officials estimate that around 80,000 people could be infected.

“It is less that one percent of the overall population but it does not mean that we should keep our eyes closed,” Dr. Qamar ul-Islam Siddiqui, the head of the National AIDS Control Programme, told a news briefing in Islamabad.

Health Minister Mohammad Naseer Khan told a news conference that Pakistan, with the help of donors, would launch AIDS awareness campaigns.

“We do not have to be pornographic, but we have to, in a simple way, inform our children, our wives, we have to educate our sisters our mothers, we have to educate men,” Khan said.

A non-governmental organisation, Amal, estimated 37 percent of reported HIV cases were a result of heterosexual transmission, 18 percent through contaminated blood, 6 percent by homosexual or bisexual activity, 4 percent through injecting drug use and 1.3 percent through mother to child.

“Unfortunately, most observers believe that the number of reported cases represents only the ‘tip of the iceberg’,” Amal said in a statement.