The first person in Korea to test positive for HIV, 53-year-old man surnamed Park, is still healthy 24 years after the diagnosis. He returned to Korea after testing positive in a routine screening to donate blood in 1985 when he was working overseas. He is single and lives alone, but is self-employed and does not rely on welfare handouts. Health officials say he lives just like other people, except for the fact that he goes to hospital every two to three months for checkups.

Increasing numbers of patients live with AIDS, the disease which majority medical opinion believes is caused by HIV, due to powerful cocktails of anti-retroviral drugs with the result that AIDS in affluent countries is now a chronic disease rather like diabetes.

According to the Korea Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 6,680 people in Korea tested positive for HIV over the last 24 years. Some 5,497 are still alive, with an 82 percent chance of survival.

Korea sees between 50 to 150 deaths from AIDS each year, but most of them involve cases where patients did not get treated until it was too late because they had no idea they were infected. Thirty-one percent or 366 of HIV-infected people died of other illnesses. Oh Myoung-don, a specialist in infectious diseases at Seoul National University Hospital, said, "The majority of people who die from AIDS in Korea succumbed to pneumonia, encephalomeningitis or other infectious disease after their immune systems weakened because they did not know they had been infected with HIV."

Tuesday is World AIDS Day designated by the UN. An official at the Korea Alliance to Defeat AIDS said, "People infected with HIV will be able seek treatment at the right time if discrimination and misunderstandings about such people vanish from society."