China should be praised for its efforts to fight AIDS, and some of its actions can set an example for other countries, an international team of researchers said on Thursday.

They said China had learned from its mistakes with SARS and was working to control the AIDS virus, which has infected an estimated 650,000 Chinese.

"China was somewhat slow to respond but once they responded they did it in a big way," Roger Detels, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who led the team, said in a telephone interview.

"And I think it is appropriate to praise them for responding vigorously."

Writing in the Lancet medical journal, Detels and colleagues singled out the government of President Hu Jintao for unusual praise. Hu, for example, publicly shook hands with AIDS patients, helping to battle the stigma, they pointed out.

"I think that was enormously important," Detels said.

Countries that have succeeded in battling AIDS, such as Uganda and Thailand, have all had major commitments from the top of the government, he said.

"The challenge of managing the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic in 2003 is often credited with further motivating the government to take aggressive policy action on HIV-related issues," they wrote.

"SARS showed not only how infectious diseases could threaten economic and social stability but also the effect of China's policies on international health problems."

China initially tried to cover up the SARS outbreak and the virus, new to science, escaped to infect 8,000 people around the world and kill nearly 800 before it was contained.

Detels and colleagues said China also mistakenly tried to keep the AIDS virus out in the 1980s.

"These early policies did little to stop transmission of HIV; in fact, they probably promoted concealment of risk activities and made identification of HIV reservoirs more difficult," they wrote.

The government now provides free AIDS drugs to rural residents and city-dwellers without insurance. Other measures include:

-- Free voluntary counseling and testing

-- Free drugs to HIV-infected pregnant women to prevent mother-to-child transmission, and HIV testing of newborn babies

-- Free schooling for AIDS orphans

-- Care and economic assistance to the households of people living with HIV/AIDS.

"These bold programs have emerged from a process of gradual and prolonged dialogue and collaboration between officials at every level of government, researchers, service providers, policymakers and politicians, and have led to decisive action," concluded the researchers, who include Zunyou Wu of China's National Center for AIDS/STD Control and Prevention and Sheena Sullivan of Edith Cowan University, in Perth, Australia.

HIV infects 39 million people globally and experts fear the incurable disease will spread even farther if countries do not act to control it.

A 79-year-old prominent Chinese AIDS activist is to fly to the United States as early as Sunday to receive a human rights award after she was freed from house arrest thanks to U.S. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Gao Yaojie is to receive the Vital Voices Global Women's Leadership Award for Human Rights in Washington in March for helping bring to light official complicity in the spread of AIDS in her home province Henan in central China, where thousands of poor farmers sold blood in the 1990s and have been infected.

To prevent her from going and embarrassing China, police in Zhengzhou, provincial capital of Henan, placed Gao under house arrest on February 1. The move sparked an international outcry.

Henan authorities relented and freed her on February 16, days after Clinton, a Democratic presidential-hopeful, wrote to Chinese President Hu Jintao and Vice Premier Wu Yi, urging them to intervene and let Gao leave for the United States.

"World pressure was too heavy. Henan was ordered by the central government (to let me go) because China did not want relations with the United States to become too tense," the retired gynaecologist told Reuters in her Beijing hotel room.

A vice health minister paid Gao a courtesy call last week to extend the vice premier's greetings, a sign of a change of heart.

But fellow AIDS activist Hu Jia declined to reveal Gao's departure details in case the authorities decide to change their mind about letting her go. She plans to return in late March.

"AFRAID OF TRUTH"

In 2001, Gao was barred from leaving China to collect the Jonathan Mann Award for Global Health and Human Rights. Two years later, Chinese authorities prevented her from visiting Manila to receive the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service.

Asked why provincial authorities initially barred her from leaving, Gao said: "They're afraid I would expose the truth.

"Blood transfusions fueled the spread of AIDS, not sexual transmission as they claim," Gao said.

Gao was among the first to expose a scandal in Henan in which people sold blood to unsanitary, often state-run health clinics, making the province the center of China's AIDS epidemic. No senior official has been prosecuted or publicly punished.

Blood-selling schemes have been banned in Henan but are not uncommon in the southwestern provinces of Sichuan and Guizhou, southern Guangxi, eastern Anhui and northern Hebei.

As of October, China had officially recorded 183,733 cases of HIV, including 12,464 already dead. But many people at risk are not tested, and some experts fear the real number is much higher.

Henan health authorities have asked Gao to water down her story when she speaks during her U.S. visit, but she was adamant.

For a woman whose feet were bound -- according to ancient custom -- when she was 5 until 11, Gao has come a long way.

Gao, who speaks Chinese with the heavy burr of Henan, is well-known in China and received warm local media coverage until her unflinching criticism became too much.

She wrote books and material warning people of the risks of blood-selling, making her a target of local authorities fearful of the social stigma and political sensitivity surrounding

AIDS.

Gao has also helped 164 AIDS orphans find new homes.

The prestige has come at a price. Her son and a brother begged her not to go, ostensibly due to official pressure.

"I have mixed feelings. I don't know how they will treat me after my return," she said. "I'm better off dead than alive. If I'm dead, everything will be fine," said Gao, who was purged and attempted suicide during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution.

Five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor, sentenced to death for infecting Libyan children with HIV, on Sunday pleaded not guilty to charges they defamed two Libyans by accusing them of torture, lawyers said.

A Libyan court sentenced the six, in jail since 1999, to death in December for starting an HIV epidemic in a hospital in the eastern town of Benghazi, to outcry from the West.

Leading scientists have repeatedly said the infections started before the medics arrived.

Libya has remained defiant under international pressure, saying others should not interfere in its courts. But Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's son and leading envoy Saif al-Islam said last month the six would not be executed.

In the HIV infection trial the Libyan prosecution based its case mainly on confessions from some of the nurses, who say they are innocent and were beaten and tortured to admit guilt.

In the defamation case a police officer, Juma Mishri, and a doctor, Abdulmajid Alshoul, are each claiming five million dinars ($3.9 million) in compensation for distress endured when the nurses gave testimony accusing them of torture.

A Libyan prosecutor urged the court to give the six the "maximum punishment" which lawyers said could be a six-year imprisonment term on top of compensation.

The court then put off the hearing until March 11 to give more time to the lawyers of the six medics who first appeared in court two weeks ago when the defamation trial began.

Alshoul and nine Libyan policemen including Mishri were tried and acquitted in June 2005 of torturing the nurses and the doctor.

Italian doctors mistakenly transplanted organs from an HIV-positive donor into three recipients, the head of a Florence hospital said on Tuesday.

Doctors at Careggi hospital told reporters that an infected woman's liver and kidneys were transplanted after a laboratory biologist incorrectly wrote on her medical records that she had tested negative for HIV.

"This was a tragic human error," said Careggi's chief Edoardo Majno.

Doctors said the 41-year old woman, who died of a brain hemorrhage, was probably unaware that she was HIV-positive and that her relatives had agreed to donate the organs.

The likelihood that the three recipients would now become infected with HIV/AIDS was very high, Majno said.

"Fuelling an alarmist reaction after this case of human error, which luckily is extremely rare, could have negative consequences for many people who are on a waiting list for a transplant," said Franco Filipponi, director of transplants for Florence's Tuscany region.

Media reports of widespread "malasanita" -- malpractice, poor hygiene and low safety standards in Italy's national health system -- prompted a nationwide police inspection of the country's public hospitals last month.

The inspections highlighted serious violations at one in six hospitals, such as rat droppings on the premises and expired medicine stocks.

Hardly a week goes by without new media reports of "malasanita."

In a case that shocked Italy a month ago, a 16-year old girl died having her appendix removed when the power failed in the operating theater and her ventilator was not plugged into a generator.

The Canadian government and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced C$139 million ($118 million) in funding on Tuesday for a Canadian initiative in the search for an HIV/AIDS vaccine.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates told a news conference that the money would go to an initiative that would try to accelerate development of a vaccine and address critical research gaps. Under the plan, a facility will be set up in Canada to manufacture and test HIV vaccine candidates.

Canada will provide up to C$111 million and the Gates Foundation up to C$28 million.

More than 40 percent of women in India have not heard of AIDS, according to a government survey that has alarmed activists.

India has 5.7 million people living with HIV/AIDS, according to the United Nations, which is the world's highest caseload. But the prevalence rate, in the country of 1.1 billion people, is much lower than in most of Africa.

The National Family Health Survey (NFHS), the most extensive study on health and nutrition in India, said in its latest report only 57 percent of women have heard of AIDS.

In rural areas, where most Indians live, less than half the women -- 46 percent -- were aware of the disease.

Activists said on Friday that poor awareness among women was fuelling the epidemic.

"This shows women don't have access to information, translating into more women getting infected," said Anjali Gopalan, head of Naz Foundation India, a leading anti-AIDS group.

In the past few years, there has been a growing "feminisation" of the epidemic in India with nearly 40 percent of all those infected now being women, including housewives.

"Biologically, women are more susceptible to HIV," said Christy Abraham of ActionAid-India. "The lack of awareness adds to the HIV threat they face."

One reason for low awareness is that the government has focused prevention efforts on high-risk groups like prostitutes and intravenous drug users, rather than on the general population.

"But we are expanding prevention efforts among the general population in rural areas, especially women, over the next five years," a government official said on condition of anonymity.

Many rural women have been infected by their husbands who work in the cities and visit prostitutes. Stigma stops infected husbands from telling their wives they are HIV-positive.

The NFHS survey, supported by UNICEF as well as the British and U.S. governments, shows a gulf in awareness between men and women, with 80 percent of men having heard of the disease.

Only 54 percent of Indian women are literate compared with 76 percent for men.

Many women in villages do not have television in their homes and miss out on anti-AIDS advertisements, say activists, calling for a broad-based effort to educate and empower women.

"Even if they do have TVs, there is no electricity in many areas. This is one way how fighting HIV is linked to the issue of general development," Abraham said.

Activists want the government to spend more training and sending grassroot health workers to spread AIDS education among women, especially in poorer and highly populated states.

In the eastern state of Bihar -- home to 85 million people -- only 35 percent of women have heard of AIDS, with the level of awareness falling to 30 percent in villages.

Gambia has ordered the expulsion of the top U.N. official in the country after she criticized assertions by President Yahya Jammeh that he was curing AIDS patients with herbs, government sources said on Friday.

Fadzai Gwaradzimba, a Zimbabwean national who is the resident coordinator of U.N. operations in the tiny West African state, was given 48 hours to leave the country, the sources, who asked not to be named, told Reuters.

Gwaradzimba's office in Gambia declined to comment.

Jammeh, a former wrestler and army officer who has ruled the predominantly Islamic country since seizing power in a 1994 coup, says he has found a natural herbal cure for patients infected with HIV/AIDS.

The Gambian president has been giving regular treatment sessions at a local hospital in which, carrying a Koran and prayer beads, he rubs patients' bodies with herb pastes and also gives them herbal potions.

The sessions, widely broadcast by Gambian state media, have been reported by international media, which have quoted world health experts as casting doubt on Jammeh's claim to be able to cure AIDS.

In a report on Jammeh's treatment sessions earlier this week, Britain's Sky News quoted Gwaradzimba as saying that claims of cures for AIDS could encourage sufferers of the disease to engage in risky behavior and make the AIDS problem in Africa worse.

Jammeh has dismissed the skepticism and insists the cure works.

A six-day national meeting of Indian sex workers started Sunday in the eastern Indian city of Kolkata to press demands for labour rights and legal recognition as entertainment workers.

Such recognition would amount to legalisation of organised sex work in India, where prostitution inhabits a legal grey area -- it is not banned outright but pimping, trafficking and solicitation of clients are illegal, participants said.

"Nearly 50,000 participants -- both organised and individuals -- from across India are meeting to press their demands," said Smarajit Jana, chief adviser of sex workers body the Committee for Indomitable Women.

The body, the biggest organisation for sex workers in West Bengal, planned the meeting being held in state capital Kolkata's red-light Sonagachi district.

"We believe the policy makers are going to accept sex workers as entertainment workers, today or tomorrow," said Jana, a doctor, addressing a rally in a public park. Sex workers pumped their fists in the air as he spoke, shouting slogans.

Such recognition would reduce stigma and afford sex workers greater rights, he said.

"Sex workers will share their views with film makers, actors, writers, rights activists and health officials on their demands and hold a rally to create public awareness," said the doctor.

Sex workers in Sonagachi are among the country's most politically active and condoms have been distributed free there, as part of a project funded by the the World Health Organisation, since 1992.

The area, where about 8,000 sex workers live, also launched a state-backed project in December to train prostitutes to use female condoms. The city is estimated to have a total of about 20,000 sex workers.

The country coordinator for the United Nations AIDS body, UNAIDS, said Sonagachi sex workers were playing a key role by actively promoting condom use, and some of the programmes there would be adapted to other red-light areas.

"More than five million people in India are now living with AIDS and it's a serious problem," said Denis Broun in his address to the meeting.

India, with a population of 1.1 billion, has the largest number of HIV-AIDS cases in the world, with 5.7 million cases, the Geneva-based agency says.

There are about 10 million sex workers in India, according to the Committee for Indomitable Women.