Thailand is soon to host an Aids awareness convention and the preparations are not exactly low-key.

Every visitor that lands at BangKok airport is to be given a condom on arrival, in a handout that is thought to total some 350,000 condoms.

In a move that will please the battered Ferang male ego, the condoms will come, forgive the pun, in two sizes, a slightly larger on for Ferang and a smaller one for Asian men. No doubt this will be thte source of much friction between Ferang and Thai males, but not necessarily in the gayest of senses.

Condoms are also planned to be handed out by traffic police to motorists stuck in Bangkoks horrendous, sweltering jams, presumably in case bored motorists decide to get sweaty with one another in an alternative manner.

Thailand is a model for Aids awareness, where the number of new cases reported each year has been drastically cut by public education and the wide and easy availability of condoms at any number of outlets. But public education isn't always the answer it would seem, and to demonstrate this, our attention now turns away from Thailand to the Zhejiang province in China some ten or so years ago.

Back then family planners in the province in China were sent out to explain the role of condoms in preventing unwanted pregancies and to stem the explosion of Aids. The social workers went to great lengths to demonstrate how the condoms were to be used and a favourite technique was to pull them over their thumbs, and encouraging the mortifiedmen and women to practise doing likewise.

Nine months later the Prefect of the province was sacked when an explosion of pregnancies occurred, despite the foresight of the prefect in providing the sex education and free condoms in the first place. It turned out that the normally cautious people in his jurdistriction had abandoned their sexual restraints and went at it gleefully like the proverbial rabbits.

Just to be sure, some had even gone to the trouble of placing a condom on both thumbs and all eight fingers.

After all, how much safer could one actually be?