‘Captain Condom’ Turned the Tide in Thailand’s War on AIDS and Overpopulation

BANGKOK — 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 Mr. Mechai decided to tackle the subject that no one else would touch, spearheading a nationwide campaign to publicize and demystify contraceptives.

“It wasn’t a job for intelligent people, smart people, respectable people, aristocratic people,” he said in a June interview.

Mr. 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…