The global community has not done enough to prevent the spread of HIV and millions of deaths from preventable disease are a "shameful failure," said the head of the International AIDS Society Sunday.

Society president Pedro Cahn was speaking ahead of the first session of the fourth International AIDS Society Conference on HIV Pathogenesis, Treatment and Prevention in Sydney.

Cahn said 11,000 people were still contracting HIV each day despite the huge advances in knowledge of and treatments for the virus.

He said fewer than a third of those living with HIV in low and middle income countries were treated with life-saving medication and even fewer could access proven prevention methods such as condoms and clean syringes.

"Science has given us the tools to prevent and treat HIV effectively," he said.

"The fact that we have not yet translated this science into practice is a shameful failure on the part of the global community."

The Sydney conference brings together more than 5,000 delegates to discuss cutting-edge treatments for HIV, including two new classes of drugs that could give hope to those who have developed a resistance to existing retroviral drugs.

It will also look at prevention strategies such as male circumcision, which has proven effective in limiting the spread of the virus.

And under its Sydney Declaration it will push for governments and donors to allocate an additional 10 percent of their HIV programme funding to research to ensure that projects are effective.

"We are badly in need of research that will tell us what impact our programmes are having in the areas of the world where 90 percent of the epidemic is focused, and how to adjust our programmes to make the best use of our investment and to save as much lives as possible," Cahn said at the opening of the conference.

Michel Kazatchkine, executive director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, speaking before the conference opened, said there was cause for hope in the fight against the disease because of the successes of the past two decades.

In 2001, only several hundred thousand people living with HIV in the developing world had access to retroviral treatments but the current figure was now 2.2 million people, he said.

"This is far beyond what most of us thought was possible," he added.

Kazatchkine said as well as the encouragement from the development of new drugs, there was also hope because the world was coming together to fight health problems as never before.

He said the scourge of AIDS had demonstrated that "we cannot have development and prosperity when AIDS is killing large parts of the population and eroding human capital."

But he said despite the Global Fund so far raising some 11 billion dollars, the main challenge to fighting the HIV epidemic was resourcing.

"We need more resources, but we also need more sustainable resources," he said.

Key adviser to the US government, Doctor Anthony Fauci, said there were now extraordinary treatments for those who have access to the right medicines.

But he also acknowledged the gap in access. "As great as those advancements are... we still now are treating only about 28 percent of the people who actually need therapy," he said.

He said prevention strategies such as male circumcision were essential to combat the disease because of the huge gap in the provision of drugs.

An estimated 40 million people are now living with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, while more than 25 million people are thought to have died from the disease.

Asia has made progress in containing HIV but must remove the stigma associated with the virus to fully consolidate the gains and keep it under control, international research chiefs say.

Speaking ahead of an international conference of 5,000 HIV/AIDS researchers in Sydney next week, America's top expert Anthony Fauci and his Australian counterpart David Cooper said HIV remained a major public health risk in Asia.

Fauci said predictions HIV would devastate Asia as it had Africa had proved false after local health authorities, which were initially slow to heed warnings, adopted pro-active policies.

But he said the potential for an epidemic still existed in a region estimated to have eight million people with HIV, a figure aid agency USAID says could climb to 40 million by 2010.

"The population density in Asia is so great, with countries like India and China that have a billion people each, that infection rates just have to track up a few percentage points and you're potentially looking at a catastrophe," Fauci told AFP.

Cooper, the co-chair of the International AIDS Society (IAS) conference, said responding to HIV was complicated by the fact that many suffers existed on the fringe of Asian society and faced discrimination.

"We're not going to have the generalised epidemics in our region that we've got in sub-Saharan Africa, we're going to have explosive smaller epidemics," he said.

"They tend to occur among drug users, also among gay men, sex workers or mobile workers such as truck drivers, fishermen who are more likely to pay for sex.

"In Asia, they're stigmatised and discriminated populations. The trick is to get into these vulnerable populations and provide non-judgemental healthcare."

Cooper cited China as an example of a country that had overcome its initial denial of an HIV problem but could go further if discrimination ended.

"China is responding pretty well, their reponse has changed, they're putting treatment in place and doing research," he said.

"But people are still very much concerned about the human rights issues and how people with HIV are treated in Chinese society."

China estimated last year that it had 650,000 HIV cases, although UN officials estimate the actual number is now higher.

A recent paper in British medical journal The Lancet praised China's adoption of schemes such as needle exchanges and awareness campaigns among gay men, although the UN said there was still resistance to confronting the problem at a local level.

In India, where the estimated number of HIV cases was this month halved to 2.5 million, the government has set out to target the type of at-risk groups identified by Cooper.

"They're talking about upscaling programmes with marginalised groups," said Anjali Gopalan, head of the Naz Foundation, which works primarily with men.

"There was quite a bit of silence on them earlier."

Indians with HIV are still often treated as social outcasts, with reports of doctors shunning AIDS patients and HIV-positive children being barred from attending school with other pupils.

In Cambodia, one of the countries hit hardest by HIV/AIDS, the authorities are concerned that discrimination is helping the virus spread.

"It is difficult for us since stigma causes infected people not to speak out and this quietly spreads the infection," said Ly Peng Sun, deputy director of the National Centre for HIV/AIDS and Dermatology.

"Bias can prevent us from fighting the virus successfully."

Vietnam has introduced laws banning discrimination against people with HIV, although locals say it means some employers simply find a pretext to sack infected workers, rather than admitting it is because of their illness.

"If this new law is effectively implemented, it will serve not only as a shield for the fundamental rights of people living with HIV... but also as a positive tool for fighting stigma and discrimination," UNAIDS Vietnam director Eammon Murphy said.

Thailand has adopted a different tack to breaking down the taboos regarding HIV with innovative education campaigns such as traffic police handing out condoms, an initiative dubbed "Cops and Rubbers."

The country, which has experienced about half a million AIDS deaths and has about the same number of HIV cases, has slashed infection rates since it appointed a cabinet-level anti-AIDS coordinator to oversee prevention efforts.

It is also pushing international drugmakers over access to generic versions of newer and more expensive HIV medications that are needed to treat patients who have become resistant to the old drugs.

The world will not be able to celebrate advances in HIV diagnosis and treatment until the United Nations' goal of universal access to drugs is reached, leading international AIDS researchers said at a conference Sunday.

"We are dealing with a preventable disease and 11,000 people are contracting HIV/AIDS every day. We are dealing with a treatable disease and more than 3 million people are dying every year," said Pedro Cahn, the president of the International AIDS Society.

"Science has given us the tools to prevent and treat HIV effectively. The fact that we have not yet translated this science into practice ... is a shameful failure on the part of the global community."

More than 5,000 delegates from 133 countries have converged on Sydney, Australia, for the Fourth International AIDS Society Conference on HIV Pathogenesis and Treatment, which runs through Wednesday.

Researchers from across the globe will present their findings on the benefits of circumcision for cutting HIV rates through to the latest developments in anti-retroviral drugs.

Lower prices for HIV drugs have significantly improved access to treatment for people in poor countries, but recent World Health Organization figures show the numbers are still far short of the U.N.'s goal of universal coverage by 2010.

Last year, some 2 million people in developing countries were receiving the anti-retroviral drugs that help treat the HIV infection, a 54 percent increase over 2005. But overall, only 28 percent of the world's HIV patients are receiving the life-prolonging drugs.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said the world health community could not celebrate the great breakthroughs in the treatment HIV/AIDS since it was first diagnosed 26 years ago until greater steps are made to prevent the disease.

"Of the projected 60 million infections that will occur by 2015, fully half of them are projected to be able to be prevented with already known and proven prevention methods," Fauci told reporters in Sydney.

"Before we celebrate 26 years since the beginning of extraordinary accomplishments, we're actually going to be judged as a society in what we do in the next 20-26 years," he said. "We cannot sustain a successful effort with HIV without prevention."

Participants at the AIDS conference will be urged to sign a declaration aimed at raising more money for HIV research.

The so-called Sydney Declaration calls on national governments and bilateral, multilateral and private donors to allocate at least 10 percent of all HIV/AIDS-related funding to research.

"We believe that without such funding we will fail to maintain a sustained and effective response to the AIDS pandemic," the declaration says.

The conference organizers say this will help speed up the implementation of new drugs and technologies to prevent, diagnose and treat the infection.

A deal has been reached to free six foreign medics sentenced to death in Libya on charges of infecting children with HIV, sources close to the talks said, but a ruling on their fate was postponed until Tuesday.

Under the deal, the families of at least 426 infected children will receive over $400 million in compensation, a source familiar with the talks told Reuters.

"We are talking about $1 million per each family," the source, who did not want to be identified because of the sensitivity of the discussions, said on Monday.

The medical workers -- five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor -- were sentenced to death in December after being convicted of intentionally starting an HIV epidemic at a children's hospital in the city of Benghazi.

In jail since 1999, the six say they are innocent and that they were tortured to confess. Foreign HIV experts say the infections started before the workers arrived at the hospital and are more likely a result of poor hygiene.

Behind the scenes talks between the EU, which Bulgaria joined in January, and families of the children have been taking place for weeks and both sides have suggested a deal was close.

Bulgaria and its allies in the EU and the United States say Libya is using the medics as scapegoats to deflect criticism from its dilapidated health care sector.

They have also suggested that not freeing the nurses would carry a diplomatic cost for Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, who after scrapping a prohibited weapons program in 2003 is trying to emerge from more than three decades of diplomatic isolation.

DEAL PENDING

Last week, Libya's Supreme Court upheld the death sentences, placing the medics' fate in the hands of the government's High Judicial Council, a government body that has the power to commute sentences or issue pardons.

The council -- which is expected to free the nurses if a deal is reached -- ended a Monday meeting with no ruling, but state news agency Jana reported it would sit again on Tuesday.

"The High Judicial Council has put off its decision on the items left from its schedule until tomorrow morning," Jana said, quoting council sources.

It did not say the HIV case was a scheduled item but lawyers and officials have said the council was due to rule on it.

Libyan officials said the body would only agree to release the nurses if a settlement is reached in talks with the families on "blood money" -- payments for which the families could grant mercy -- and funding for the children's medical care.

Another source familiar with the negotiations said the final details of the deal had yet to be agreed.

"They have not completed the work on the details over implementing the compensation deal. It will take more time, perhaps 24 hours or more to complete the work," the source said.

A delay in sealing the accord could postpone the decision by the council on the fate of the medics, experts say.

It was also not clear who would be paying the more than $400 million involved in the deal.

Relatives of the children have said the infections were part of a Western attempt to undermine Muslims and Libya.

Moves to bring sex out of the closet in largely conservative India have kicked up a morality debate between educators who say sex education will reduce HIV rates, and critics who fear it will corrupt young minds.

It's an emotive issue pitting modernists against conservatives in a country with the world's highest number of HIV cases at about 5.7 million, a figure that experts say may balloon to over 20 million by 2010.

Biology teacher Thelma Seqeira infuriates conservatives in India every time she tells her students about masturbation, condoms and homosexuality.

Seqeira is doing exactly what India's federal government wants the country's 29 states and seven federally-administered regions to do -- fight the exponential spread of HIV/AIDS with information on safe sex.

"Sex education is the best way to prepare my students for adolescence and protect them from HIV/AIDS," said Seqeira, who teaches at a private school in Maharashtra state, western India.

But the governments of Maharashtra, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh don't agree. They have banned sex education at public schools because they say the learning modules are too explicit, and some pictures are too graphic.

Private schools are able to continue the lessons, but many have watered them down to avoid controversy.

The southern states of Kerala and Karnataka -- considered among India's progressive states with high literacy rates -- are also considering bans.

The Indian government has been unable to stop these bans even as it seeks to curb the spread of HIV. In India, about 86 percent of HIV infections occur through sexual intercourse, one key reason being that migrant workers in cities visit prostitutes and infect their wives when they return home.

KAMA SUTRA

Ignorance about sex is widespread in the land of the Kama Sutra, where explicit sex acts are celebrated in ancient temple architecture.

But at home, mothers hesitate to talk to daughters about something as simple as menstruation, and even the basics of the human reproductive system are taught with much embarrassment in schools.

Experts are calling for a change in prudish attitudes to help counter the spread of HIV/AIDS. They say the winds of change must first blow through the country's schools.

"Sex education does not mean you are encouraging sex which is how it's interpreted," Renuka Chowdhury, India's minister for women and child development, told Reuters last month.

"Sex education is an insurance for your child. It will protect your child."

Among the course elements that have generated much heat are discussions on homosexuality and descriptions of sex acts, including masturbation.

Proponents of the ban say the sex education course -- modeled on those taught in many Western countries, will make students imbibe "decadent western morality."

They point to polls showing that an increasing number of young people -- mostly India's moneyed youngsters that live in cities -- have postponed marriage, but not sex.

An India Today poll revealed one in four Indian women between 18 and 30 in 11 cities had sex before marriage. One in three said she was open to having a sexual relationship even if she was not in love.

"AIDS is spreading because of cultural decadence and sexual anarchy," said Shajar Khan, a prominent student leader who opposes sex education at schools.

Analysts say conservative political parties, such as the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, India's main opposition group, are panning sex education courses at least partly to make political capital out of opposing the West.

But for parents bringing up children in rapidly modernizing India, sex education may be a matter of life and death.

"The argument that if you teach about sex the children are going to run out and have sex is very unfounded," said Roshni Behuria, a mother of two girls.

"Killing the education bit won't reduce the propensity towards sex. But it just might end up killing safe-sex ignorant young people."

Former President Bill Clinton said Saturday that cheap anti-AIDS drugs were no magic bullet for ending the epidemic ravaging Africa, and that the continent needs better overall health care.

Affordable medicine "will soon be not much of an issue anywhere," Clinton said during a one-day visit to the southern African nation of Zambia, which has been ravaged by AIDS.

"How cruel it would be if people continue to die because of inadequate health care facilities in rural areas," he said while touring a new drug distribution warehouse in Lusaka financed by his charitable foundation.

Since leaving office in 2001, Clinton has negotiated lower prices on AIDS drugs for poor countries in Africa and Asia, helping to extend tens of thousands of lives. The effort, however, is still hampered by overstretched facilities, stigma and an acute lack of skilled staff.

"When we look to the future, we have to ask ourselves how the rest of the system can catch up with the medicine," Clinton said.

Zambia has put more than 93,000 HIV-positive people on anti-retroviral treatment over the past few years, with help from the United States and other partners. But about 16 percent of the population is HIV-positive, and the country has a serious shortage of health care workers.

Clinton's first visit to Zambia was the third stop on an African tour that also took him to South Africa and Malawi. He will fly to Tanzania on Sunday.

Zambian officials vied for photos with Clinton. "You were great in office, and you are even greater out of office," Zambia's health minister, Brian Chituwo, said in a speech.

Clinton toured the warehouse with Philippe Douste-Blazy, chairman of the board of UNITAID, an organization formed last year by France and 19 other nations that earmarked some airline tax revenues to fight HIV/AIDS in developing countries.

The Clinton Foundation and UNITAID announced a deal in May to lower the cost of back-up drugs to HIV-positive people with resistance to standard treatment.

Clinton also presided over a youth soccer tournament in Lusaka and stressed the importance of HIV testing. "Most of the people in Africa, and in the world, who have the HIV virus ... do not know it," Clinton told a crowd of children and dignitaries.

Bill Clinton charmed crowds in South Africa this week, showing the diplomatic skills he could put to use if his wife becomes America's first female president.

Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., has said that she would make the former president a roaming ambassador, using his talent to repair the tattered image of the United States abroad.

Guests at a birthday function Bill Clinton attended Thursday for former South African President Nelson Mandela wanted to know if the American was ready for a role reversal.

"You bet!" Clinton said, sitting next to a chuckling Mandela.

He added he hoped he would not have to give up his Clinton Foundation work on AIDS, malaria and climate change. His current trip includes visits to a soccer youth outreach program in Zambia and a rural hospital in Malawi.

Clinton has used his prestige and contacts to negotiate lower prices on lifesaving AIDS drugs in Africa. He's also worked with former President George H.W. Bush in raising funds for victims of the 2004 tsunami.

Like Bush and Jimmy Carter, Clinton has put the lessons learned as president to use internationally in his post-presidential career, said Theodore J. Lowi, a professor of American government at Cornell University who has written extensively on the presidency.

If Hillary Clinton is elected president, employing her husband as a roving ambassador would be smart in terms in foreign policy — and also in terms of establishing her own authority in the White House, Lowi said.

Bill Clinton "is held in very high esteem in this country," said Elizabeth Mataka, an AIDS activist in Zambia who was recently appointed the United Nations' special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa.

Richard Cornwell of the Pretoria-based Institute for Strategic Studies said Clinton's presidential legacy on the continent was worth studying.

"I don't think Africa really occupied a massive part on his global scheme. If you look back in retrospect on his administration Africa barely features in its index," he said, saying Bill Clinton's Sudan policy was "singularly directionless" and noting he apologized for moving too slowly to stop the Rwandan genocide.

Clinton demonstrated his popular touch Friday after listening to a farmer discussing problems facing subsistence peasants in Malawi, one of the poorest southern African countries.

"When a farmer speaks as well as you have done, he quits and joins politics," he grinned.

In Malawi, where televisions are rare, most had heard of Clinton prior to his visit. But there was uncertainty over his wife.

When asked his opinion about Hillary Clinton running for office, carpenter Tapuwa Shiri said: "For which country?"

He then turned his attention back to Bill. "I wish he run for office here because with his wealth all of us can be rich. We can start using dollars."

South Africans were curious about one of Hillary Clinton's rivals, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., whose father was Kenyan and who was met with great excitement when he traveled through Africa last year.

Did Bill Clinton wish for a "Clinton-Obama, Obama-Clinton ticket?"

"It would be foolish for Hillary, or, frankly, for any of the others running to contemplate who their vice president's going to be. We've got a race to win first. Then I will entertain such questions, if I am asked. And if I am not asked I will keep my thoughts to myself."

Military and civilian authorities have charged an HIV-positive soldier with assault with a deadly weapon, accusing him of having unprotected sex with a partner he didn't tell about the infection.

Military and civilian prosecutors haven't decided who will prosecute the case against Pfc. Johnny Lamar Dalton, said Maj. Tom Earnhardt, a spokesman for the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg.

Dalton, 25, was arrested last week and was being held Tuesday in the Cumberland County jail on a $50,000 bond, said sheriff's department spokeswoman Debbie Tanna. She said inmates weren't allowed to give interviews, and a jailer said the soldier hadn't been appointed an attorney.

Along with the assault count, Dalton faces civilian charges of committing a crime against nature and misdemeanor assault inflicting serious injury. Earnhardt said he faces the same charges in the military's criminal justice system.

An arrest warrant filed by county officials accuses Dalton of not telling his male partner, an 18-year-old civilian, that he has HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. The teen's mother alerted authorities to the relationship after her son fell ill and told her about it; he has tested positive for HIV. Tanna said she did not know whether Dalton was the source of the teen's infection.

Dalton is assigned to the 22nd Aviation Support Battalion, which is part of the 82nd Airborne, Earnhardt said. He was ordered by his commander in November not to have unprotected sex after it was discovered he was HIV-positive. State law also prohibits a person infected with HIV from having sex unless condoms are used and requires that sexual partners be notified.

"All the command knew was that he had been diagnosed with HIV," said Earnhardt, who added that HIV infection is one of several medical conditions, including pregnancy, heart disease and cancer, that would prevent a soldier from deploying. "What a service member does when they're off duty, we have to depend on their honor and integrity."

Earnhardt said Army prosecutors aren't focusing on the soldier's sexual orientation. The military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy allows gays and lesbians to serve if they keep their sexual orientation private and do not engage in homosexual acts. The law prohibits commanders from asking about a person's sex life and requires discharge of those who openly acknowledge they are gay.

"Our real focus is here we are with two families who are having to cope with the tragedy of this disease," Earnhardt said.

A public art project celebrating individuals who have worked to ease the suffering of people living with HIV and AIDS is taking shape in the heart of Washington's gay community.

An excerpt from "The Dresser," a Walt Whitman poem about tending to soldiers wounded in battle, is being carved in the granite wall of the Dupont Circle Metro station. A dedication for the project, which also will include a second poem by Howard University Professor E. Ethelbert Miller around a nearby bench, was held over the weekend.

The project was the initiative of District of Columbia Council member and Metro board member Jim Graham. Graham served as executive director of the city's Whitman-Walker Clinic, which cares for people with HIV, from 1984 to 1999, and was its volunteer president for four years before that.

Graham said the engraved lines were meant to pay tribute to people who came forward to help cope with the crisis when the AIDS epidemic first hit. There was little understanding then of what was making people sick and little federal support for efforts to cope with it, he said.

The city's first AIDS forum was held in April 1983, and 1,100 people showed up, Graham recalled.

"The people who showed up became the volunteer buddies, lawyers, social workers, all manner of caregivers," he said. "Many of the people who volunteered themselves became sick and died."

Barbara Chinn, who today directs Whitman-Walker's Max Robinson Clinic, was among those who helped mobilize an effort to deal with the crisis in the early days.

"You would respond if someone needed someone to sit with them, if there was someone who needed to be fed, to hold their hands in their last days," Chinn said.

Washington has one of the highest HIV infection rates in the nation. It is estimated that one in 20 adult residents have the virus, according to the Whitman-Walker Clinic. The U.S. House last month lifted a ban on using District of Columbia tax funds to provide clean needles to drug addicts, which advocates say is key in helping bring HIV infection rates down.

Despite the sobering statistics, Graham said that today there is not the sense of urgency about AIDS that there was in the 1980s.

Chinn agreed, saying she worries that medical advances have made people inured to the issue, even though AIDS continues to take a serious toll.

"I have heard younger people, when I try to caution people about at-risk behaviors, say, 'Oh, you can take a pill — I'll be all right,'" she said.

The Dupont Circle project was funded by the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities and implemented by Metro. It is expected to be completed in August.