BEIJING (AFP) - The number of HIV/AIDS) cases in China is increasing at a rapid rate of 40 percent a year, a health ministry official was cited as saying by state media.

The official, who was not named, said China had become the second worst-hit country in Asia and the 14th in the world, without providing figures, the China Times reported.

The health ministry told AFP that new data on the number of Chinese HIV/AIDS patients would be made public Tuesday, a day before World AIDS Day.

Until now China has maintained that it has an estimated 840,000 HIV/AIDS sufferers although international AIDS experts say the actual number is much higher.

China has admitted it does not know the real numbers. The United Nations predicts China could have 10 million cases by 2010 if action is not taken.

Since AIDS was first detected in China in 1985, an estimated 160,000 people have died.

Many HIV/AIDS patients were infected by contaminated blood in government-run and illegal blood-selling operations in the 1980s and 1990s.

Intravenous drug use, prostitution and ignorance about the disease are also cited as big problems in its spread.

China orders local officials to learn more about AIDS

Chinese leaders ordered local officials to learn about AIDS as the government on Wednesday tried to show its commitment to fighting the disease by broadcasting television scenes of President Hu Jintao visiting AIDS patients.

Criticized for its slow response to AIDS and for harassing health activists, the government marked World AIDS Day by publicizing efforts to slow the spread of the disease among prostitutes and intravenous drug users _ the two highest-risk groups in China.

China says it has an estimated 840,000 people infected with the AIDS virus and 84,000 have the full-blown disease. The U.N. AIDS agency has warned that the country could have as many as 10 million people infected by 2010 if it doesn't take urgent action.

Hu called on "leaders of various levels to enhance their HIV/AIDS knowledge," the official Xinhua News Agency said.

The central government has distributed 100,000 copies of a pamphlet meant to educate local officials about the disease in hopes that will encourage them to promote anti-AIDS work, Xinhua said.

"Officials ... may have limited knowledge of disease and feel scared," Hou Peisen, director of National Health Education Institute, was quoted as saying. "It is hoped that by educating them on related policies and dispelling their concerns the state policies can be followed and implemented locally."

State television devoted the first half of its 30-minute midday newscast to showing Hu on Tuesday visiting a Beijing AIDS ward _ the first time the Chinese leader has been shown meeting AIDS patients.

Wearing a red AIDS awareness ribbon on his blue windbreaker, Hu was shown shaking hands and chatting with one patient, and nurses were shown singing.

The communist government has promised free testing and free treatment for the poor. But it still detains and harasses activists who campaign for better treatment.

Xinhua reported on a needle-exchange program for drug users and efforts to teach prostitutes about the disease in the southern region of Guangxi, which borders Vietnam.

But in many parts of the country, local officials are reluctant to take action for fear of acknowledging that their areas have drug use and prostitution.

A joint report released Tuesday by a U.N. agency and the Chinese Cabinet's AIDS task force warned that the virus was spreading out of such risk groups as drug users and into the general population.

Official squeamishness prompted elite Peking University to cancel a plan to give out free condoms on Tuesday. School officials reportedly said doing it so openly was inappropriate.

In Shanghai, universities went ahead with plans to hand out condoms on campus.

"As a form of publicity about AIDS prevention, condom distribution on campus is especially effective," said Wang Xifang, a Communist Party official at Shanghai Jiaotong University, quoted by the Shanghai Youth Daily newspaper.

In Beijing, a spokesman for the International Federation of the Red Cross, criticized the government's strategy of creating separate prison sections for inmates with the AIDS virus as "discriminatory and unnecessary."

"You don't get AIDS from sharing a glass or sitting next to someone," said Red Cross spokesman John Sparrow. "There's no more reason to isolate infected people in prisons than there is in the general population."

Nations Pledge to Eradicate Ignorance About AIDS

BEIJING (Reuters) - The world's two most populous nations promised on Wednesday to eradicate ignorance about AIDS, a disease dismissed at first as a Western evil confined to drug users, homosexuals and prostitutes.

In the world's poorest continent, Africa, where the epidemic has ripped huge holes in the social and economic fabric, thousands staged rallies to mark World AIDS Day.

The World Health Organization estimates there are 25.4 million HIV sufferers in sub-Saharan Africa, 60 percent of the global total in a region with 10 percent of the world's population.

Activists and governments around the world marked the day with events drawing attention to the disease and promoting its eradication.

"HIV/AIDS is the greatest health crisis of our time. Its defeat requires the cooperation of the entire global community," President Bush said in Washington.

China, criticized for its slow initial response to HIV/AIDS, put on a display of commitment to fighting a disease the United Nations fears could infect 10 million Chinese by 2010.

In India, where over five million people have already been infected, the government pledged greater efforts to promote awareness, especially in rural areas and among the young.

"The world can no longer afford to ignore the enormity of the HIV epidemic," Antonio Costa, executive director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, said in Beijing.

"Aids affects us all," said U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan who called it "the worst epidemic humanity has ever faced."

At an event sponsored by six New York investment firms, Annan urged corporations to try to prevent the further spread of AIDS by treating infected workers and speaking up about it.

In South Africa, Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane of Cape Town used AIDS Day to criticize the government, which activists have long accused of moving too slowly against a disease that affects one in nine of the population.

"With regard to our government's endless stalling, I am at a loss," Ndungane said in a speech at an AIDS rally.

TEARING APART FAMILIES

Veteran politician Mangosuthu Buthelezi urged congregants at a Cape Town cathedral to break down the stigma of AIDS -- which has claimed two of his children. "AIDS is decimating our people, tearing apart our families, uprooting our communities," he said.

In the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, K.Y. Amoako, chairman of the Commission of HIV/AIDS and Governance in Africa, warned that women were accounting for an increasing proportion of Africans suffering from the disease.

"The resulting social decay and community breakdown may well threaten the socio-economic fabric of our continent," said Amoako.

In badly hit countries like Botswana, Swaziland and Zambia, AIDS deaths are robbing economies of workers, families of breadwinners and cutting average life expectancy by decades.

Botswana President Festus Mogae told the BBC that 37 percent of Botswanans were infected with HIV. "We don't seem to be getting on top of it," he said bleakly. "We have to say things like 'abstain or die."'

In Nigeria, President Olusegun Obasanjo announced new plans to combat the scourge. Under the U.S.-sponsored Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, Nigeria hopes over the next five years, to prevent 1.1 million new infections and provide care for 1.7 million infected people.

"Our country is at a crucial stage of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the strength of our proactive response could set the stage for containing or reversing the situation," Obasanjo said

On the Indian Ocean island of Madagascar, the head of the local Catholic Church outraged activists by saying condoms had helped spread the deadly virus by encouraging promiscuity.

"Condoms do not work. They do not stop the virus getting through," Cardinal Gaetan Razafindatrandraare said in a speech the government invited him to make.

Local activists were disgusted. "The cardinal ... has no right to misinform people in this way," said Lalaina Raholiarimanga, Madagascar program coordinator for the UK-based charity Aids Alliance.

In Uganda an energetic government education campaign has seen infection rates drop from 30 percent in the early 1990s to 6 percent. The U.S. embassy in Kampala said Uganda would be one of four countries to benefit from a $12 million grant to carry out HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis research and training.

In Thailand, where a mass public awareness campaign in the 1990s has been credited with sharply reducing the number of new HIV infections, youngsters paraded through shopping centers dressed as condoms to distribute condoms to other teenagers.

But activists and experts said attitudes toward women and gays were hampering efforts to fight the disease.

"Of the 14,000 people newly infected with HIV every single day, nearly half of them are women," Geeta Rao Gupta, president of the International Center for Research on Women, said in Washington. "Millions of women became infected while monogamous and faithful, so focusing solely on personal behavior and risk absolutely does not go far enough."

ISLAMABAD (AFP) - Asia-Pacific societies could collapse like some in Africa as a result of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, a top United Nations envoy warned at a regional conference in the Pakistani capital.

"There is nothing whatsoever in our cultures or lifestyles to prevent an African-scale outbreak of HIV/AIDS in Asia," said Nafis Sadik, a Pakistani doctor and special envoy of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan) on the disease in the region.

"We are at make or break stage in the fight against AIDS," she told the regional Women, Girls and HIV/AIDS Best Practices Conference in Islamabad.

"HIV/AIDS is the greatest long-term threat to human security, human rights and economic development that the Asia-Pacific region will face in the next decade."

Asia-Pacific is now about 13 years behind Africa, where societies in the worst-affected countries, including prosperous Botswana, are collapsing and economic growth is disappearing, said Sadik.

"It could happen in this region; it will happen, unless we act," she cautioned.

"Prevalance rates are still low in most parts of most countries, but this is rapidly changing.

"Let me emphasise: all the conditions are in place for a general outbreak in Asia-Pacific in the next ten years."

Over 300 delegates from Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, India, Iran, Nepal, Vietnam and the United Kingdom are attending the three-day conference, the region's first to examine best practices in controlling the disease.

Seven million people in Asia Pacific countries are currently infected with HIV/AIDS, according to UN figures. One third are women, and four million of them are in India.

More than half a million people die each year and the cost to the region in 2001 was 7.5 billion dollars.

In South Asia, women and girls are most vulnerable. Young women on the subcontinent account for 62 percent of infections in the 15-24 year old age group. In India, 90 percent of HIV-positive women are married and monogamous.

Without action 10 million adults and children in Asia-Pacific will be affected in the next six years at a cost of 17.5 billion dollars, Sadik warned.

"A widening pandemic will mean the end of efforts to eradicate poverty, and empower women and girls, who are most of the poor," she said.

Under UN estimates, HIV/AIDS could slow poverty reduction by up to 60 percent a year in Cambodia, and by nearly a quarter in India.

To avert five million new infections and 100,000 deaths annually by 2010, five billion dollars a year needs to be poured into comprehensive HIV/AIDS programs, Sadik said

Hong Kong HIV, AIDS cases on the rise

A total of 14 people tested positive for AIDS during the period, up from nine last year, bringing to 703 the total number of AIDS cases reported since 1985, the Health Department said.

Speaking at a press conference, HIV/AIDS special preventative programme consultant Dr. S.S. Lee said HIV was mainly spread through sexual contact, needle-sharing among drug users and from infected mothers to their babies.

Sexual transmission was to blame for 25 percent of the HIV cases in the city while 16 percent were transmitted through homosexual or bisexual contact. Only six percent were infected through intravenous drug use.

The remaining 26 cases were undetermined due to inadequate data.

Lee said there has been an increasing number of HIV infection in drug users which remains a cause for concern.

Taiwan to launch AIDS prevention campaign amid rise in female cases

As of November 15, Taiwan had reported 6,483 HIV carriers since 1986. Of those, 1,234 new cases -- including 84 among women -- were reported this year, according to the Center for Disease Control (CDC).

The number of female carriers has doubled since 2003, the CDC said.

Nearly 80 percent of the female victims were married and contracted HIV through sexual contact, the center added.

"We must urge women, particularly older, married ones, to protect their health by requesting their husbands-partners use condoms," said Tsai Shu-fen, director of CDC's AIDS division.

"Some women consider marriages as their protection but (such a mentality) could be dangerous in AIDS prevention," she added.

Tsai said the CDC would work with women's rights groups and education authorities to promote AIDS prevention among girls and women.

The CDC will also provide HIV screenings for pregnant women as part of pre-natal checks starting January 1.

As of mid-November the fatal syndrome had killed 1,017 Taiwanese since the first case involving a local person was found in 1986.

SINGAPORE (AFP) - Couples planning to get married in Singapore may have to undergo HIV testing as the government seeks to intensify measures against rising new infections in the city-state, the Sunday Times reported.

Health Minister Khaw Boon Wan said late Saturday there have been suggestions that couples should be tested for HIV as part of marriage planning, but public feedback would be sought before any decision is taken.

"Should we do it? I don't know," Khaw said at the sidelines of a community event.

"But if you ask me as a parent, I think there is no harm. I have three girls and you do not know what their boyfriends will be like," he said.

Last week, the government announced pregnant women will soon be automatically tested for HIV as part of intensified measures to fight a rise in infections.

The latest figures from the health ministry showed the number of new infections hit a record high with 257 cases reported in the first 10 months of the year.

Some 242 new cases were reported for all of 2003. Most of the new HIV infections involved heterosexual men who contracted the virus through casual sex or sex with prostitutes.

Health officials fear that new cases will surpass 300 this year, from just two recorded in 1985, 111 in 1995 and 226 in 2000.

Singapore, with a population of 3.4 million citizens and permanent residents plus one million foreign workers and their families, has recorded a total of 2,332 HIV infections to date, of whom 874 have died, 564 have full-blown AIDS and 894 show no symptoms.

HIV, AIDS Cases Rise Among U.S. Gay, Bisexual Men

Wed Dec 1, 2004 01:47 PM ET

By Paul Simao

ATLANTA (Reuters) - A rise in new cases of AIDS and HIV infection among gay and bisexual men in many U.S. states, reported in a federal study on Wednesday, has given support for concerns the disease is resurgent in the country.

The report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, released in connection with World AIDS Day, said new HIV and AIDS diagnoses in 32 U.S. states rose 11 percent among gay and bisexual men between 2000 and 2003.

Rates were stable among most other population sectors, and the overall infection rate rose to 19.7 cases per 100,000 people in 2003 from 19.5 per 100,000 people in 2000.

AIDS, which destroys the immune system and leaves victims vulnerable to an array of opportunistic infections and cancers, has killed about half a million Americans and 22 million people worldwide since 1981.

Gay and bisexual men are believed to account for a majority of the estimated 850,000 to 950,000 Americans living with HIV, the virus that causes the disease.

In the United States public health experts have been warning of a possible resurgence of the epidemic, which eased in the early 1990s following the development of antiretroviral drugs targeting the disease.

Since the late 1990s, when U.S. deaths from AIDS stabilized at 16,000 per year and new HIV infections stabilized at 40,000 per year, the disease has shown signs of a comeback, particularly among gay and bisexual men.

Between 2000 and 2003, a total of 125,800 people were diagnosed with HIV or AIDS in the 32 states, according to the new report.

Forty-four percent of these cases occurred among gay and bisexual men. "Men who have sex with men continue to constitute a substantial proportion of HIV/AIDS cases," said the CDC.

It said blacks, who represent about 13 percent of the U.S. population, made up 51.3 percent of all HIV and AIDS cases diagnosed in the same period.

New York, California and other states that had not used confidential, name-based reporting of HIV and AIDS cases for at least four years were excluded from the study.

A number of health departments across the nation also have reported a worrying surge in syphilis and some other sexually transmitted diseases among gay and bisexual men. Sexually transmitted diseases are known to increase the likelihood of contracting HIV.

To combat the HIV/AIDS epidemic in America, the U.S. government decided last year to emphasize programs that focus on testing and counseling people who are already infected.

Some AIDS activists, however, fear the new approach will lead to reduced funding for many programs that emphasize condom use and other safe-sex practices for uninfected people.

The CDC, which hopes to cut the number of new annual HIV infections in half within five years, also has recommended routine HIV testing be expanded to include pregnant women, intravenous-drug users and anyone who engages in unsafe sex.

Sexual abstinence drives stretch facts

Thu Dec 2, 2004 06:22 AM ET

According to a congressional staff analysis, some courses teach that touching a person's genitals can lead to pregnancy, abortion can lead to sterility and suicide, and half the gay male teenagers in the United States have tested positive for the AIDS virus, the Post said.

The report, prepared for California Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman, reviewed the curricula of more than a dozen projects aimed at preventing teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease, the Post said.

The Bush administration will provide $170 million (88 million pounds) next year to groups that teach abstinence only. Several million children age nine to 18 have participated in more than 100 federal abstinence programs since they began in 1999.

The report found that 11 of the 13 most commonly used curricula in such programs contained unproved claims, subjective conclusions or outright falsehoods regarding reproductive health, the Post said.

Waxman's staff found the curricula included misconceptions such as a 43-day-old foetus is a "thinking person," HIV can be spread through tears and sweat and condoms failed to prevent HIV transmission in 31 percent of the time in heterosexual intercourse, the Post said.

"I have no objection to talking about abstinence as a sure-fire way to prevent unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. I don't think we should lie to our children about science," Waxman told the newspaper.

TOKYO (AFP) - Japanese condom sales are sagging as a passion for the Internet leads the Japanese to choose unprotected sex, if any sex at all, the nation's largest condom manufacturer said ahead of World Aids Day.

Domestic shipments have shriveled 43 percent from the peak in 1980 of 737 million to just 419 million condoms in 2003, according to the latest health ministry data.

Industry experts said omnipresent pornography in the hi-tech country meant fewer people were having sex -- and among those who still are, fewer are using condoms.

"Since the advent of the broadband Internet in Japan, people can connect the entire night without having any extra charges," said a spokeswoman for top condom maker Okamoto Industries.

"Those people who cannot break away from their computers are not able to have sex," she said.

Youngsters are also getting the wrong impression from pornography, in which condom use is rare.

"Schools teach sex education but they don't go as far as the act itself," the spokeswoman said. "As a result, young people are learning about sex from adult videos. There aren't any scenes where the actors are using condoms."

But among those who practise safe sex, Japanese businesses have found a robust market for discerning customers.

Condomania, a colorful condom shop with outlets in Tokyo's hip Harajuku, Shibuya and Odaiba districts, said its sales have increased from a year ago, having been able to puncture the embarrassment associated with condom-buying.

"Until Condomania, condoms were sold in Japan only in drugstores and were wrapped in paper so you couldn't see the package," said Kei Shigyo, a spokesman for Condomania's parent firm, Sea Road International.

Condomania has put its product in packages that look fashionable or indistinguishable from candy. One looks like a pack of Lifesavers.

"If it falls out of one's bag, you can't tell they are condoms," he said.

Although the number of Japanese infected with HIV at the end of 2003 was estimated at 12,000, a marginal figure in a population of 128 million, the United Nations said sexual transmission of the virus was growing.

"One of the characteristics in recent years is that the infection through sexual contacts in Japan is getting higher among Japanese men," said a 2004 report on Japan by UNAIDS and the World Health Organization.

A high percentage of Japanese HIV/AIDS cases are still among haemophiliacs who were given tainted blood products in the mid-to-late 1980s and early 1990s, the report said.

SEOUL (AFP) - North Korea has no cases of AIDS and has adopted a plan to block infiltration of the killer syndrome from outside the country, a top Pyongyang health official said, according to a report.

The assertion was made by Choe Ung-Jun, head of the Ministry of Public Health's sanitary inspection agency in an interview with the December edition of Korea Today, a Pyongyang English-language Internet magazine.

"In our country there is no AIDS patient," Choe was quoted as saying. "But activities for AIDS prevention and control are being conducted to prevent its infiltration from the outside."

"In the DPRK (North Korea) a national AIDS strategic plan (2003-2007) was mapped out ... and its own specific conditions and AIDS prevention work is now effectively under way."

Choe said an education campaign was alerting North Koreans to the threat of AIDS, while experts were being trained in treating it and medical equipment including testing methods was available.

The interview took place to mark World AIDS Day on Wednesday and coincided with the publication by the United Nations of a gloomy report on the impact of the deadly disease.

The UN report says more than 23 million people have died since AIDS first emerged in 1981. An estimated 3.1 million will have died in 2004, the highest toll in any single year.

The HIV virus that causes AIDS is known to wreck the human immune system, leaving the body exposed to infection by other viruses and bacteria.

The magazine Korea Today is an English monthly run by a North Korean Internet portal "Naenara" (wwww.kcckp.net).