Mechai Viravaidya is a politician and activist in Thailand who has improved the lives of millions with groundbreaking
family planning and HIV prevention programs.
Thanks to his innovative efforts to promote contraception, he is best known by his nickname: Mr. Condom
My name is Mechai Viravaidya. Fifty years ago,
I realized that Thailand needed to reduce its population growth.
I introduced a system of
community-based distribution of contraceptives to supply pills and condoms through their villages.
So, that was the beginning and luckily after about twenty-two years,
we were able to bring down the population growth rate from seven children per family to under two.
And soon after that HIV hit Thailand, in the mid-1980s.
People didn’t know very much about it
and the government was concerned that if we talked about it, it would drive away tourism.
We had to let the public understand about HIV, what HIV was, how did you get it, and how do you not get it.
Eventually we got a system passed,
educated the Thai public,
we trained everybody. We use the condom to promote
what family planning is supposed to be, and it generated interest, you can use it as a balloon, and it made people laugh.
I started giving out condoms to help to spread the message,
so we used every method we could and we got school children to have relay races with condoms,
condom-blowing championships, so they weren’t embarrassed by the condoms,
and that’s the issue that they could then talk about other aspects of family planning.
Soon after the year 2000, the United Nations said that there was a decline in
90% of new infections during that period. 8 million people had been prevented from being infected.
One columnist wrote a story and called it the Mechai story,
we will now call the condom by this name, Mechai. And now it’s officially registered as a proper name for condoms.
We have to wake up again to educate the public. The risk is now with the younger generation.
The numbers are far lower, but the risk is still there.
