Clinton

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Bill Clinton marked the fifth annual World AIDS Day by pledging millions in help for countries struggling with rising disease rates and large numbers of orphaned children.

"We cannot forget our profound obligation to the heartbreaking youngest victims of the disease, the orphaned children left in its wake," Clinton said. "We cannot restore to them all they have lost, but we can give them a future."

AIDS is on the decline in developed countries, but the United Nations says the immune disorder is gaining fast elsewhere.

"The epidemic is frankly out of control in many places," according to a report last month by the United Nations agency UNAIDS.

Many of the measures Clinton announced Tuesday aim at Africa, where as many as 1 million children are infected with the virus that causes AIDS and nearly 8 million have been orphaned by the disease. The Agency for International Development says as many as 40 million children could be orphaned by 2010.

Clinton announced $10 million in grants to help care for AIDS orphans, and he used the occasion to tout increased spending on anti-AIDS research by the National Institutes of Health. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Brian Atwood, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, joined the president for the ceremony.

Within the United States, increased NIH funding includes an additional $47 million for vaccine research, and more money for treatment of "opportunistic infections" like tuberculosis that kill people with HIV and AIDS.

The administration also announced $200 million in housing assistance for AIDS patients and their families, as well as $156 million toward fighting AIDS in minority communities.

People around the globe marked World AIDS Day in a variety of ways:

• In New York, an AIDS Day rally moved to a plaza in front of City Hall after a march down Broadway. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani successfully banned the protest from the building's steps, citing security concerns.

Demonstrators tried to challenge the ban in court and lost. A federal appeals court ruled Monday that the protest could not take place on the building's steps.

Hundreds of AIDS Day protesters converge on the City Hall Plaza in New York

• In South Africa, President Nelson Mandela warned that the silence surrounding the disease in African societies was helping to spread AIDS.

"It is the silence that is letting this disease sweep through our country, adding 1,500 people each day to more than 3 million already infected," he said.

• In Kenya, marches were organized in the worst-hit rural areas. Hundreds of people joined a rally in the vast Nairobi slum of Dandora.

Young girls carried signs that read, "Be faithful to one sexual partner" and "Using a condom means that you really care" as they marched past huge piles of rotting garbage and broken sewers to a rally.

• In Hong Kong's nightspots, activists handed out coasters with pictures of a condom on one side and a safe-sex message on the other.

• And in New Delhi, uniformed schoolchildren joined prostitutes to stage a noisy march through the Indian capital.

About 33.4 million people around the world are infected with HIV, two-thirds of them in sub-Saharan Africa. In Asia and the Pacific, 700,000 people become infected with HIV per year.

"We are facing here a crisis that is unprecedented," UNAIDS executive director Peter Piot told a news conference in Johannesburg on the eve of World AIDS Day.

Piot said more than a fifth of the adult population in Botswana, Namibia, Swaziland and Zimbabwe is infected with HIV and that South Africa is gaining fast.

Albright said AIDS poses a "global threat" that nations should treat as a foreign policy question.

"I will do all I can to see that this imperative is raised as a matter of international security at the highest levels, at every opportunity," she said.

Two areas of growing concern to AIDS campaigners this year are the growth of the disease in Asia and its spread among children.

Carol Bellamy, the executive director of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), stressed that young people are bearing the brunt of the AIDS casualties and that the disease is wiping out substantial reductions in child mortality.

"At a time when rich countries have made substantial progress in controlling the virus, the unfolding catastrophe of HIV/AIDS in the developing world is a measure of how profoundly the human rights of children and young people in those countries are being violated," she said in a statement.

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.