‘Captain Condom’ turned the tide in war on Aids, overpopulation
PUBLISHED : 6 AUG 2022 AT 10:52 

Mechai Viravaidya, known as Captain Condom, looks on next to a condom table decoration. (File photo) 

Mechai Viravaidya twice saw Thailand in desperate trouble - first from a ruinous population explosion and then from the Aids epidemic - and he responded to both crises the same way: with condoms and his own considerable charisma.
Birth control was something Thais neither talked about nor very much practiced in the early 1970s, when the country's population was growing at an unsustainable pace and the average family had seven children.  So Mechai decided to tackle the subject that no one else would touch, spearheading a nationwide campaign to publicise and demystify contraceptives.

"It wasn't a job for intelligent people, smart people, espectable people, aristocratic people," he said in a June interview.
Mechai, now 81, is in fact all of these, the foreign-educated son of two doctors, the husband of a former private secretary to the king and, over the years, a government minister, organizational leader and senator. But he is also uninhibited, unpretentious and always willing to put on a show to persuade people. His goal with the family-planning campaign, he said, was to make condoms just one more item shoppers picked up in the market, along with soap, toothpaste and dried fish.  To pull that off, he knew it would help to lend condoms positive associations, something that made people smile.

"If I can accomplish that by blowing up condoms or filling them with water," he said, "then fine, I'll do it."

School students blow up condoms to promote the use condoms to prevent sexually transmitted diseases at a UN Population Fund event in Bangkok on July 11, 2017. (File photo: Chanat Katanyu)