On Sunday, millions of people around the world marked World AIDS Day with marches, prayers and hope -- even as grim statistics show the epidemic is outpacing efforts to control it.

• In China, officials instructed 1 million students to launch a national AIDS campaign.

• Officials in Britain warned that the country is likely to have a 20 percent increase in new HIV cases this year: twice that reported at the end of the 1990s. "We are moving in the wrong direction, and that is extremely worrying," said Barry Evans of the Public Health Laboratory Service.

• In South Africa, the country hit hardest by AIDS, activists held a mass funeral for babies; the ashes of some were interred during a Johannesburg ceremony.

• Thousands took to the streets of Hanoi and Bangkok to promote AIDS awareness. "Silence is death when it comes to fighting HIV/AIDS," Jordan Ryan, the UN resident coordinator in Vietnam, told some 3,000 demonstrators in Hanoi.

• In India, where 4 million people are HIV-infected, officials in the eastern city of Bhubaneshwar unfurled a 3.7-mile-long banner to mark the day.

• In Malawi, where about 9 percent of the population is HIV-positive, the government said AIDS is decimating the civil service and the economy. "Every day we are burying our workers, our teachers, our doctors and other professionals," Vice President Justin Malewezi said in a statement issued with the findings of a new study.

• In politically troubled Zimbabwe, President Robert Mugabe acknowledged that 2.2 million of the nation's 13 million people are HIV-positive, and 700,000 children have been orphaned by AIDS.

• In South Africa, Deputy President Jacob Zuma said, "there is no longer a distinction between those living with HIV/AIDS and those who are not. We are all living with the disease and are affected by it in many ways."

More than 40 million people worldwide are HIV-infected, according to the UN. This year, AIDS will kill 3.1 million people, and another 5 million will be infected by HIV, according to UNAIDS.

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