China claims 20 percent of its estimated 840,000 HIV/AIDS patients got the disease from selling plasma, although international experts believe the total number of cases and people infected through blood sales is far higher.

The China News Service said China has shut down 49 blood collection and provision institutions in a recent campaign to curb the practice in the central province of Henan, the worst affected from the blood-selling scandal.

It said 35 serious cases of illegal blood collection were under investigation, and 19 suspects had been arrested.

Meanwhile, 42 blood collection stations and medical services have received "severe punishment" for illegal blood deals, the agency reported without giving details.

The campaign has also examined blood products of 24 companies with three ordered to halt production, it said.

According to the Henan government, most of the 14,505 HIV carriers in the province became infected after selling blood in the 1990s to a group of illegal blood stations which used unsanitised instruments.

Of the 30 million, around 20 million are men and 10 million women, Zhang Beichuan, an expert with the Heilongjiang Provincial Health Bureau, told AFP.

With a population of 1.3 billion people Zhang estimates that about two to five percent of adult men are gay in China, while lesbians account for half the percentage of homosexual males.

Despite a clear preference for same-sex partners most of them will marry at some point, succumbing to the pressure of long-standing conservative cultural traditions that stress the importance of family, experts said.

While 25 years of sweeping economic changes have helped bring much greater freedom and choice in personal affairs, China's gays are still a marginalised group, the Shanghai Youth Daily quoted Cong Zhong, a health professor at Beijing University, as saying.

"Chinese people see gay activities as something disgusting and against the Chinese moral and ethic," said Cong, who blames widespread ignorance on weak educational levels.

China has never officially published a study on the country's gay community and it was only in 2001 that homosexuality was removed from the list of mental disorders.

"Chinese authorities usually adopt a silent attitude on many issues such as homosexuality, prostitution and drug users because they see these problems as shameful," said Zhang, who hopes to break new ground with a survey later this year.

The unprecedented study will focus on homosexuals and homosexual HIV carriers as part of efforts to contain a worsening AIDS problem.

OTTAWA (Reuters) - Leaders from the Group of Seven rich industrialized nations need to do more to aid poor African countries, Canadian Finance Minister Ralph Goodale said on Thursday.

"Quite frankly, I don't believe we are doing as much as we should be doing, or as well as we should be doing it," Goodale told reporters on a conference call from Mali, the final stop on a four-nation fact-finding tour for British Prime Minster Tony Blai's Commission for Africa.

G7 nations focused on aiding Africa in 2002 when Canada hosted the leaders' summit, but other issues such as national security "overtook" that agenda and the leaders let Africa drop down their list of priorities, Goodale said.

"We all need to refocus international attention as Mr. Blair is trying to do," he said.

Britain takes the presidency of the G7 in 2005 and says it intends to make Africa a high priority.

Agricultural trade liberalization, access to affordable medicines to combat epidemics such as HIV/AIDS, and improved transparency in the granting and distribution of aid financing are among recommendations Goodale said he was considering.

"It's not something where one little change in world trade is going to be some kind of panacea that's going to solve everything," he noted.

"There's a complex matrix of things that has to happen here. Part of it is leveling up the playing field in world trade but there are also ODA (overseas development aid) issues, FDI (foreign direct investment) issues, capacity and transparency issues," Goodale said.

One concrete measure would be for G7 finance ministers to give serious consideration at October's annual International Monetary Fund meeting to calls for an extension of debt relief programs beyond the end of 2006, Goodale added.

($1=$1.30 Canadian)

U.S. to Set Aside Cash for Global AIDS Fund

Wed Aug 18, 2004 06:28 PM ET

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States will set aside $120 million for the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria to give European donors time to come up with a bigger share for 2004, the U.S. AIDS czar said on Wednesday.

Randall Tobias, the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator, said he would hold the money until September, when European nations come back from summer vacations.

He could have appropriated the cash for other programs under his purview but instead is holding it in case he can add it to the $360 million the United States has already put into the Fund for this year.

"I have decided to use my discretion to create a one-time response," Tobias wrote in a letter to Fund Director Richard Feachem.

"I therefore intend to hold in abeyance the approximately $120 million in funds that will likely revert to me, for the purpose of creating a new incentive opportunity for the Global Fund to generate new and unanticipated contributions."

He said on Sept. 30 he would see how much other countries have given and would increase the U.S. share accordingly.

"I hope that at the end of this one-time window, all of the U.S. funds held in abeyance on July 31 will help generate additional non-U.S. government contributions, and, in turn, become eligible for transfer to the Global Fund," he wrote.

Tobias has been under heavy pressure to raise the U.S. contribution to the Fund.

But the United States has other AIDS programs as well, notably a $15 billion, five-year initiative targeting select countries in Africa and the Caribbean and Vietnam. And by law the United States can give no more than a third of the Fund's operating budget.

The Global Fund was created in 2002 as the brainchild of U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, with the help of the World Bank and other organizations. It accepts proposals for local HIV and AIDS programs and decides which to fund.

It has asked for $3 billion a year, $1.2 billion of this from the United States.

In July Global Fund Director Richard Feachem said it had so far received pledges of just $1 billion and was in a bad cash crunch.

AIDS activists said they were encouraged by the flexibility shown in the move but said the United States did not give nearly enough to the Global Fund anyway.

"This is flexibility after the damage has been done," said David Bryden of the Global AIDS Alliance.

"This is flexibility on the part of an administration that is trying to undermine the Fund and destroy the Fund in terms of its original vision. It is flexibility that we are glad to see. But the real question is what is going to happen to the Fund?"

Bryden said AIDS groups had a pledge in writing from John Kerry, the Democratic nominee for president, that he would double U.S. AIDS funding if elected in November.

 

As Uganda AIDS rate falls, orphan ranks swell

Orphans in foster care in Jinja. Photo by Mercedes Sayagues

In 1991, he was away from home when rebels in Gulu, northern Uganda, abducted his parents. He never saw them again. The boy, 11, moved in with relatives who mistreated him. In 2000, he was kidnapped in a rebel raid on his village near Gulu but later released.

Today Onen, 24, earns his living making wooden doors and desks.

Onen is one of an estimated 2.2 million orphans out of a population of 24 million who lost one or both parents to war or AIDS. According to UNICEF, 20 percent of Ugandan children aged six to 17 are orphans.

Once at the epicenter of the AIDS pandemic, Uganda has achieved a dramatic drop in its HIV prevalence rate to six percent from over 20 percent in the late 1980s.

Paradoxically, as new infections decline, the number of orphans rises due to the time lag between infection, sickness and the death of parents.

“Uganda has not yet come to grips with its tremendous orphan crisis,” Stephen Lewis, the United Nations special envoy for HIV/AIDS, told AlertNet during a visit to several projects for orphans and street children in Jinja.

LAST RESORT

Uganda’s approach is community-based. Orphanages are the last resort. The schemes in Jinja try to track down families, place children in foster care or arrange adult supervision for older teenagers living in groups.

Reuniting children with their families can be tricky. Of the 1.6 million people displaced by brutal strife in northern Uganda 60 percent are children under 18.

UNICEF estimates that the Lord's Resistance Army, a rebel group that has waged an 18-year war with the government, has abducted some 10,000 children to serve as fighters, porters and sex slaves since June 2002.

Reception centres for children returning from captivity – some 9,600 returned between June 2002 and May 2004 -- report that half of the girls are HIV positive.

Such is the fear of abduction by rebels that about 44,000 children now walk every evening from small villages to bigger towns to seek the closest thing to a safe haven on the streets, earning themselves the nickname “night commuters”.

“If sending children to the troubled north or to abusive families could be harmful we look for alternative solutions,” said Harriet Obbo, project manager at Child Restoration Outreach, in Jinja.

Outreach rescues street children through a process of counseling, reinsertion in school and family reunion. Dysfunctional families are helped through community clubs to attend parenting-skills and adult-literacy courses and obtain small grants for income-generating schemes.

“We don’t want the children to belong to us but to the community,” Obbo said.

In six years, Outreach has taken 420 children off the streets.

BACK TO SCHOOL

Uganda is putting the final touches to its orphan policy, titled “Hope never runs dry”. It makes the family and the community the first line of response and shifts the focus from helping individual children to helping households where they live.

"If we want families to take in children, we must help them,” said Sheila Coutinho, UNICEF officer for orphans and vulnerable children.

Money is coming in for orphans. The Global Fund for Aids, Malaria and Tuberculosis has given Uganda an initial $2 million and a further $56 million is waiting for approval.

Access to education is the main problem. Although primary school has been free since 1997, the hidden costs of books, uniforms and transport force many orphans to drop out of school. Secondary school is nearly impossible for orphans.

The Mama Jane Children's Care Centre in Jinja estimates high school costs $235 a year, including tuition, books, uniform and lunches.

The Centre, in its 34th year, cares for 70 children aged three to 18 with similar stories.

Neighbours brought five-year-old Veronica Kyakumaire, now 14, after her parents died of AIDS. The same was true for Rachel Nairuba, 15, brought in as a baby. Many children were abandoned on the street as infants and have always lived at Mama Jane’s.

Uganda is not alone in facing an orphan crisis. According to the UNAIDS 2004 Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic, Africa has 12 million orphans today and will have 18 million in 2010.

"Africa can handle prevention, treatment and home based care but no country is handling well the number of orphans," the U.N.’s Lewis said, calling for urgent national policies to tackle the crisis.