4:05 p.m.

A van carrying two AIDS activists from the Campaign to End AIDS left from Portland City Hall this morning, headed for the first presidential debate in Oxford, Miss.

The van, the first of eight leaving from all parts of the country, will stop in Boston, New York and other cities to pick up more activists and create a caravan.

"Our message is simple, it's clear and it's urgent: The next president of the United States must develop a national AIDS plan within the first 100 days of office," Andrew Bossie, director of the Maine AIDS Alliance, told about 40 cheering supporters wearing and waving red foam rubber fists.

Dennis Weakley of Albany, N.Y., who left in the van with Larry Bryant of Washington, D.C., said Maine may be a smaller, less populated state, "but the issues are the same as anywhere else in the nation."

"We need full funding for education and outreach that isn't based on ideology but based on science," Weakley said. "We need full funding for housing for people living with AIDS and HIV. We need full funding for needle exchange. And we also need a long-term renewal of the support structures that keep care networks and agencies' doors open."

It's estimated there are 1,700 people in Maine who have HIV, and the number continues to climb. Nationally, 1.6 million people have tested positive for the virus.

"We just found out recently through CDC numbers that new infections have gone up 20 percent to 56,000 per year," Bryant said, "so we're not heading in the right direction and we need policy and we need leadership that begins in the White House that starts to talk about how we can put an end to a treatable and preventable disease that we're not doing enough to treat or prevent."

Bryant said the group expects at least 300 activists to converge on Mississippi for the Sept. 23 debate.

"We have people from all over the country -- from the east coast, from Hawaii, people are flying down from Alaska," he said. "The idea is to have a true representation of what the epidemic is at the debate."

Cynthia Cushing, a Portlander who was diagnosed in 1996, said it's important to educate the next generation about the disease.

"We need the help of our government to do this, and I'm here to beg for it," she said. "It's important for us to raise awareness among everybody that AIDS is not going away. It's here to stay unless we do something about it."