AIDS activists called for greater political backing to exploit scientific progress in the battle against the pandemic, at the start of a major international conference.

More than 5,000 researchers and experts are in Rio de Janeiro for the third annual International Aids Society (AIS) congress to examine advances in treatments for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, which has killed millions in the past two decades.

Experts from 114 countries are to present studies focusing on developments in treatments, vaccines and basic science until Wednesday.

Helene Gayle, director of HIV, Tuberculosis and Reproductive Health programmes at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, called the conference "an opportunity to explore state-of-the-art scientific developments".

But she told delegates that scientific progress had to be backed up by greater political action to help the growing number of sufferers.

The goal of achieving universal access to HIV treatment by 2010 was recently endorsed by the Group of Eight industrialised powers at a summit in Gleneagles, Scotland.

Africa has about two thirds of the estimated number of AIDS/HIV sufferers around the world and most of them do not have access to new treatments.

Stephen Lewis, a UN envoy for Africa, questioned the results of the recent G8 summit as he highlighted the plight of AIDS sufferers in the continent.

"First, I would argue that the G8 summit was not a breakthrough; it was in fact a disappointment. I would argue that we got caught up in music, and the spectacle, and the spin and the celebrities, and we applauded before applause was justified," Lewis told the conference.

He said that while the cancellation of multilateral debt for 18 countries -- 14 in Africa -- was a start, Africa still carried the "insurmountable burden" of over 200 billion dollars of debt that crippled the battle against poverty and the pandemic.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, about 60 percent of the estimated 465,000 sufferers get new treatments. But Brazil, the host nation, has been hailed for its aggressive policies to counter AIDS.

More than 150,000 of the 362,364 AIDS victims registered between 1980 and June 2004 are getting new cocktails of drugs to battle the syndrome.

Brazil was chosen for the main AIDS conference of the year because of its efforts to bring free treatment to sufferers and campaigns to prevent the spread of the disease, including giving out large numbers of free condoms.

The Brazilian government has started the widespread production of generic drugs since the start of the 1990s and soon hopes to be self-sufficient in the production of anti-AIDS treatments.

The authorities made an accord this month with the US pharmaceutical giant Abbott to bring down the price of its drug Kaletra which is used in anti-retroviral therapies.

About 23,400 Brazilian sufferers currently get the cocktail and this is expected to rise to 60,000 in the next six years.

Malaysians are alarmingly ignorant about how HIV/AIDS is spread, with forty percent of them believing that beautiful women cannot get infected with the virus, survey results showed.

A large majority -- 60 percent -- of Malaysians surveyed believed or were unsure if a mosquito bite could give them the virus while 40 percent thought a healthy-looking person, a beautiful woman or a handsome man could not get infected, according to the poll by the Universiti Putra Malaysia.

The university's associate professor Lekhraj Rampal told the New Straits Times he found the results of the survey, which involved about 18,805 people aged 15 and above, surprising.

"We say we are spreading the awareness message but it is not reflected on the ground," he was quoted as saying.

The paper said it showed 48 percent of those surveyed did not know whether a HIV-positive woman could transmit the virus through breast-feeding, while 56 percent believed HIV could be spread by sharing meals.

The health ministry earlier this month said 61,486 people were infected with HIV as of September last year -- 75 percent of whom are intravenous drug users.

AIDS activists say a lack of education about the virus, plus a deep-rooted reluctance to discuss sex or admit the extent of the problem, have hindered mainly-Muslim Malaysia's fight against HIV/AIDS.

Recently the government announced it would begin distributing free needles and condoms to intravenous drug users to fight the spread of HIV/AIDS, a plan that critics attacked as going against religious teachings and being a waste of public funds.

Several Malaysian states have already introduced compulsory HIV tests for couples intending to marry.

Russia and its neighbors should lift their ban on using opiates such as methadone to treat addicts who inject drugs, scientists at an international AIDS conference said on Monday.

"Methadone is essentially an AIDS prevention tool," said professor Chris Beyrer, founding director of the Center for Public Health and Human Rights at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Beyrer praised Russia for scrapping, starting this year, a measure barring drug users from participating in free AIDS treatment programs.

"This thrills us a lot. But they are still opposed to methadone use, which remains illegal there. They need to get as many people as possible off the needles," said Beyrer, calling the ban a legacy of the Soviet system.

Methadone is taken orally, avoiding the use of needles that can spread AIDS. This substitution therapy can help satisfy addicts' cravings while allowing them to function normally.

The World Health Organization recently recommended that the treatment be integrated into national HIV/AIDS programs.

Another scientist at the Rio de Janeiro conference said Russia agreed to treat drug users with AIDS only because it was a condition attached to millions of dollars in foreign aid.

Others said AIDS screening figures from the region, with the exception of those from Ukraine, were not very reliable.

Ukraine, which tops ex-Soviet states in the HIV incidence rate with 1.4 percent of the adult population infected, has a fledgling substitution therapy program. But it recently upset anti-AIDS groups with a proposal to ban methadone.

Researchers say actual rates in other former Soviet countries could be higher. In Russia, the rate is more than 1 percent.

"It's a relatively recent epidemic but it's fast-growing. It is just getting going," Beyrer said.

Such fast-growing epidemics have never been seen in countries with declining populations, he added. Belarus, Ukraine, Russia and Kazakhstan are all losing people.

"So the implications may be more severe as the disease infects mainly young people and there is already a shortage of them."

"All this is due to a rising tide of heroin, with injection infecting people almost exclusively. But next we'll have a lot to do with sexual patterns of drug users," Beyrer said.

On a positive note, there was evidence that condom use was becoming the norm in Russia, at least among prostitutes, he said.

Massive population growth in the poorest countries, global aging, and the battle against the AIDS virus, were key challenges for the international community over the next fifty years, according to an international conference which concluded here.

This month the world's population crossed the 6.5 billion mark. But the increase has slowed from a two percent annual rise in the 1960s to 1.2 percent today -- with the nine-billion-mark expected to be cracked around 2050.

Falling fertility rates in Europe, Latin America and Asia have contributed to this slowdown. In China, home to 1.3 billion people and a one-child policy, the number of children per woman has fallen to 1.7 from a peak of 7.5 in the 1960s.

However in Africa fertility rates remain high and populations are predicted to rise rapidly, tripling by 2050 in a number of countries including Burkina Faso, Burundi, Chad, Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia and Uganda.

Demographer John Cleland of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine said that population increase could contribute more to deepening poverty than HIV infection in sub-Saharan Africa, where the population is predicted to rise from 750 million to 1.7 billion during this period.

In Europe and Asia falling birth rates and longer life expectancy are leading to an aging of the world's population.

According to UN figures, 20 percent of today's population in developed countries are over 60 and by 2050 that proportion is projected to rise to 32 percent.

"If nothing is done, the aging of the population will lead to a reduction in the workforce, a fall in economic growth and large shortages of labor," said Martine Durand, an economist with the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Raising the retirement age is one of a number of politically difficult policy options facing governments along with increased immigration, encouraging people to have more children and employment creation, as they try to counter the economic effects of having a shrinking workforce and growing number of retirees.

Durand said governments in developed countries are already taking measures to delay retirement. Italy, Finland, Spain, Norway and France have already restricted the possibility of early retirement while Austria, Switzerland and Belgium have raised the legal age of retirement.

Due to falling fertility rates, immigration will continue to play an important role for a number of countries, particularly in Europe, over the next 25 years.

"Without immigration a number of European countries would experience a substantial fall in their populations," said Serge Feld of the University of Liege in Belgium.

Only Finland and France will be increasing their populations largely from natural population growth.

Increasing life expectancy is the other driver in the aging process with people in rich countries expected to live to an average of 82 years by 2050 compared to 76 years today, according to UN figures.

In the 50 least developed countries average lifespan is also expected to rise from 51 to 67, a figure which is conditional on the implementation of government programmes to treat HIV-infected people and stop the spread of the virus.

Life expectancy in southern Africa, which has the highest HIV infection rate in the world, has fallen from 62 years in 1990-95 to 48 years in 2000-2005. It is set to drop further -- to 43 years over the next decade -- before a slow recovery starts.

Some three million people died of AIDS related illnesses in 2004 while five million people became infected -- taking the global total to 40 million.

The two countries with the largest populations, China and India, are now on the frontline in the battle against the spread of HIV.

Vinod Mishra of the research company Demographic and Health Surveys said that in China the disease has broken out of the high-risk groups of injecting drug users and sex workers and is spreading through the general population.

China's massive urban migration, which has risen from 11 million in 1982 to 79 million in 2000, may be "the 'tipping point' in China's battle with the AIDS epidemic," according to Xiushi Yang of the Old Dominion University.

China has 840,000 HIV infected people or 0.1 percent of the population, although this likely to be an underestimate.

India has 5.1 million people infected with HIV representing 0.9 percent of the population, ranking second behind South Africa with 5.3 million in absolute numbers.

Former President Bill Clinton dedicated a pediatric AIDS clinic Monday that was established with the help of his foundation to treat children infected with HIV.

Clinton also reviewed progress made by the government in expanding access to HIV/AIDS treatment.

The government, with the help of the Clinton Foundation, launched a program last year that enrolled 5,000 patients across the tiny African kingdom.

The foundation is providing a supply of pediatric anti-retroviral medicine as part of an initiative that seeks to increase the number of children being treated from less than 100 to about 750 by the end of the year.

An estimated 22,000 children in Lesotho are infected with the HIV virus.

"Lesotho is helping to prove that pediatric HIV/AIDS treatment is indeed possible in the developing world," Clinton said. "We are trying all we can to help. Every child has a right to life, to grow up, to have a healthy life, to dream their dreams and to get educated."

Clinton said the government had done a remarkable job in a short term, but that its program needed more funding to provide universal treatment.

Clinton, on a six-nation tour in Africa to check on projects funded by his foundation in the battle against AIDS, visits South Africa next.

Despite some progress, U.N. peacekeepers still haven't been trained well enough to protect themselves or the people where they're deployed from AIDS, the top U.N. AIDS official said Monday.

Dr. Peter Piot urged the U.N. Security Council to make that training an "explicit and timebound goal," but council diplomats agreed only to address the issue again and made no firm commitment.

Piot, chief of UNAIDS, spoke during an open council meeting to discuss progress five years after it passed a landmark resolution on HIV/AIDS. The document, Resolution 1308, was the first time the council cited a health issue as a threat to national security, and zeroed in on the problem of peacekeepers both spreading and contracting AIDS.

The issue has become especially relevant after the United Nations found earlier this year that peacekeepers in Congo had sex with Congolese women and girls, usually in exchange for food or small sums of money. Abuses have been reported in peacekeeping missions ranging from Bosnia and Kosovo to Cambodia, East Timor, West Africa and Congo.

Nations have come a long way in making sure their militaries address the AIDS pandemic, but soldiers need more access to testing and counseling, he said.

"We are still too far from the point where responding to AIDS is a part of core military business," Piot told the council.

Some steps have been put in place — such as distributing condoms on mission, including AIDS outreach in peacekeeping mission mandates and sending more AIDS advisers on deployment.

In some missions, rules have been put in place to protect people from peacekeepers and making sure the troops behave. Congo has a total anti-fraternization policy, while in other places, peacekeepers are prohibited from some bars or are required to wear only their military uniforms.

The man who was the driving force behind Resolution 1308, former U.S. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, said he was disappointed with the presidential statement adopted by the council at the end of its meeting.

Holbrooke — as well as Piot — wanted the council to declare the AIDS pandemic an international emergency and to put renewed emphasis on testing. He also had hoped the council would review the issue at least every year; in the end, it said it would welcome "regular briefings, as needed."

Holbrooke said he was encouraged that the debate even took place.

"There was a new mood in the room," Holbrooke said. "Countries that refused and even objected to this event five years ago today supported it. And bureaucracies move slowly but they're moving."