China to prosecute deliberate AIDS infections

Wed Dec 6, 2006 8:21 AM GMT

BEIJING (Reuters) - China will prosecute people who deliberately infect others with HIV, state media said on Wednesday.

"Those who know they are infected with AIDS or are sick with AIDS and deliberately infect others will be severely punished according to the law," the Beijing News said, citing an unnamed police officer as telling an AIDS prevention workshop.

It provided no details on what kind of sentences would be meted out, nor how police would prove the virus had knowingly been passed on by someone.

Police would also deal just as severely with criminal suspects who have AIDS as those who do not, the report said.

"For criminal suspects infected with AIDS, they cannot not be dealt with or given free rein just because they are infected," it quoted another unnamed official with the State Council's AIDS prevention office as adding.

China has been grappling with a surge in the number of HIV/AIDS cases, which the government last month said had risen almost 30 percent so far this year.

An estimated 650,000 people are living with HIV/AIDS in China, and health experts say the disease is moving into the general population.

Drug abuse this year accounted for 37 per cent of the new infections whose transmission routes had been determined, while unsafe sexual contact had caused 28 per cent, the Health Ministry said in November.

The official Xinhua news agency added in a late-night report seen on Wednesday that police would crack down on places where AIDS might spread, such as illegal blood collection centres and places were drug users and sex workers congregate.

HIV/AIDS became a major problem in China in the 1990s when hundreds of thousands of impoverished farmers became infected through botched blood-selling schemes.

After initially being slow to acknowledge the threat, China has stepped up the fight against HIV/AIDS, increasing spending on prevention programmes and implementing anti-discrimination legislation.

But some non-governmental groups have complained of police harassment when carrying out AIDS prevention work, and the UN's main AIDS body has said the good intentions of the central government were not always enforced at the local level.

The hospital in Heilongjiang province infected 15 patients with HIV through transfusions of untested blood from illegal blood sellers, the China Daily said.

"Three of the 15 patients passed the virus on to their spouses, and a mother infected her 5-year-old child, bringing the total number of victims to 19," the paper said.

The victims developed AIDS and have been living in poverty. One of them has died of the disease.

A man and his wife who made a living selling their contaminated blood to the hospital, and whose blood was used for the 15 victims' transfusions, have also died.

Three of the hospital's staff were sentenced to jail terms ranging from two to 10 years last June for illegally collecting and supplying blood, the China Daily said.

Earlier this year, China banned sales of donated blood in a bid to contain the spread of HIV/AIDS and other diseases after a spate of reported HIV infections from sold plasma.

HIV/AIDS became a major problem for China in the 1990s when hundreds of thousands of impoverished farmers contracted the virus through botched local blood-selling schemes.

Experts from the United Nations and the Chinese health ministry estimate about 650,000 people in China are currently living with HIV/AIDS. ($1=7.826 Yuan)

Clinton urges end to HIV/AIDS stigma in Vietnam

Wed Dec 6, 2006 1:11 PM ET

By Grant McCool

HANOI (Reuters) - Former U.S. President Bill Clinton urged young Vietnamese on Wednesday to talk more about HIV and AIDS to reduce fear and ignorance of the disease and discourage discrimination.

"The more you talk about it and the more people see flesh and blood human beings who are HIV positive who are good people and not frightening," Clinton said during a one-day visit with his New York-based Clinton Foundation for HIV/AIDS.

Vietnam, which has an estimated 280,000 HIV infections out of a population of 84 million people, is fighting to stop the spread of the epidemic to the general population from high-risk groups such as injecting drug users and prostitutes.

The Communist Southeast Asian country's epidemic is less serious than neighboring Cambodia and Thailand, but health authorities say the number of cases is rising rapidly at 100 new infections per day.

Clinton made his remarks during a panel discussion entitled "Fighting HIV/AIDS, Empowering Youth in Vietnam".

Earlier he signed an agreement with the government for his group to provide AIDS drugs to more Vietnamese women and children.

The foundation opened its Vietnam office in July and this was Clinton's second visit to the country, part of a week-long Asian tour on Tsunami recovery and HIV/AIDS.

In 2000 when he was still in the White House, Clinton became the first U.S. President to visit former war enemy Vietnam, five years after the normalization of relations.

Last month, Clinton's successor President George W. Bush made a state visit.

The ruling Communist Party, international health groups and donors have worked in recent years to fight stigma and discrimination that leads to HIV positive people being denied employment or schooling.

A new law comes into effect in January that includes anti-discrimination language.

The Clinton Foundation says that since its inception three years ago, it has helped bring care and treatment to 500,000 people living with HIV and AIDS around the world.

PHNOM PENH, Dec 4 (Reuters) - Former U.S. President Bill Clinton praised Cambodia on Monday for its success in fighting HIV/AIDS, saying other countries should take note of its twin strategy of public education and widespread condom promotion.

"There is a hope that Cambodia can be a model for the rest of Asia and perhaps for the rest of the world," Clinton said after a signing ceremony on behalf of his Clinton Foundation with Prime Minister Hun Sen.

The impoverished southeast Asian nation has one of the highest HIV/AIDS rates in the region, although infection levels among the adult population dropped to 1.9 percent in 2004 from 3.3 percent in 1998.

"For the last several years you have made progress over reducing the infection rate here as it has gone up in most the rest of the world," Clinton said.

"And yet we know it is still a significant challenge that requires us to do more to provide that treatment for those in need, for children and adults," he said.

It is not known how much HIV/AIDS assistance the Clinton Foundation is giving Cambodia, although Minister of Health Nuth Sokhom said it included testing equipment for at least four laboratories.

Clinton also visited an AIDS orphanage in the capital, Phnom Penh, run by the Mary Knoll Roman Catholic missionary organisation as part of his campaign to reduce discrimination against sufferers.

Hun Sen said he hoped Clinton's visit would serve to reinforce the HIV/AIDS message to Cambodia's 13 million people, the target of several years of government- and donor-funded safe-sex campaigns.

According to the National AIDS authority, more than 2 million condoms are sold each year.

"Your presence here sends a big message to Cambodian youngsters about preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS as well as stopping discrimination against those living with the disease," Hun Sen said.

NEW DELHI, Dec 8 (Reuters) - Condoms designed to meet international size specifications are too big for many Indian men as their penises fall short of what manufacturers had anticipated, an Indian study has found.

The Indian Council of Medical Research, a leading state-run centre, said its initial findings from a two-year study showed 60 percent of men in the financial capital Mumbai had penises about 2.4 cm (one inch) shorter than those condoms catered for.

For a further 30 percent, the difference was at least 5 cm (two inches). A poor fit meant the prophylactics often didn't do the job they were bought for, and led to some tearing or slipping off during use.

"One of the reasons for a failure of up to 20 percent (of condoms) is the association of the size of the condom to the erect penis," the council's Dr. Chander Puri told Reuters, adding another reason was couples often put them on in a hurry.

Puri said many men in India, which has the world's highest HIV positive caseload, were too shy to ask for condoms.

"We need more vending machines for condoms of different sizes so people can pick a condom with confidence that is suited to their needs," he said.

The Times of India reported the ICMR survey had studied 1,400 men between 18-50 years of age in cities like Mumbai and New Delhi as well as in rural areas in a report. It entitled its story "Indian men don't measure up".

By Patricia Reaney

LONDON, Dec 6 (Reuters) - Scientists have produced new evidence that casts doubts on charges against five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor accused of deliberately infecting 426 Libyan children with HIV in 1998.

The trial of the six health workers ended in Tripoli last month. The prosecutor demanded the death penalty after five Libyan HIV/AIDS experts stood by their 61-page report written in 2003 that found the infections resulted from an intentional act.

A Libyan court is expected to deliver a verdict on Dec. 19.

But a team of international scientists who reconstructed the history of the virus from samples from the children have shown the subtype of HIV began infecting patients at the Al-Fateh Hospital in Benghazi before the foreign medical team arrived.

"The evidence shows the chain of infection started a few years before the arrival of the foreign staff accused of causing it deliberately," Dr Tulio de Oliveira, a molecular virologist at Oxford University in England, said in an interview.

The scientists, whose findings are published online by the journal Nature, analysed the genetic code of HIV and Hepatitis C viruses from the children to determine when the outbreaks started. They did an extensive analysis using 20 different models.

"All of them give a date for the start of the epidemic around the mid-1990s," said De Oliveira.

He added that a team of 10 specialists from around the world who reviewed the research think the results are "extremely solid."

The six medical workers, who have protested their innocence and said their confessions had been made under torture, arrived in Libya in March 1998. They have been in detention since 1999.

INDEPENDENT SCIENTIFIC ASSESSMENT

De Oliveira and his colleagues in Oxford collaborated with scientists from several European universities to conduct an independent scientific assessment of the data. Their findings are expected to be presented to the Libyan authorities.

The medical workers were sentenced to death by firing squad after being convicted in a trial in 2004. The verdict was quashed last year by the supreme court and the case was sent to a lower court.

Earlier scientific evidence provided by Luc Montagnier, a co-discoverer of the virus that causes AIDS, concluded the infection at the hospital resulted from poor hygiene and the reuse of syringes and had also begun before 1998.

"All the lines of scientific evidence point in the same direction, towards a long standing infection control problem at the hospital, dating back to the mid 1990s or earlier," Dr Oliver Pybus, of Oxford University and a co-author of the Nature report, said in a statement.

The United States, which is in the process of restoring full diplomatic ties with Libya after decades of hostility, backs Bulgaria and the European Union in saying the medical workers are innocent.

Libya has been under pressure to hear independent scientific evidence about the case. International experts have criticised the scientific report used in the trial.

In an open letter to Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi published last month in Nature, more than 100 Nobel Laureates in the sciences called for a fair trial for the medics.

"A miscarriage of justice will take place without proper consideration of scientific evidence. We urge the appropriate authorities to take the necessary steps to permit such evidence to be used in this case," the Nobel winners wrote in the letter.

Lawyers representing the families of the infected children have requested compensation of 15 million Libyan dinars ($11.6 million) for each infected child, which would lead to a total bill of about $4.6 billion

One in 4 Zimbabwe children are AIDS orphans: UNICEF

Tue Dec 5, 2006 9:32am ET

HARARE (Reuters) - Zimbabwe now has the world's highest percentage of children orphaned by AIDS, with almost one in every four children having lost at least one parent to the disease, the United Nations Children's Fund said on Tuesday.

Zimbabwe is among the countries worst hit by the HIV/AIDS pandemic, which kills more than 3,000 people every week and accounts for 70 percent of hospital admissions.

But the crisis-hit southern African nation has also become one of the continent's few AIDS bright spots after its HIV prevalence rate declined to 18.1 percent this year from 25 percent five years ago.

Despite this, UNICEF said the number of children orphaned by AIDS continued to rise.

"Almost one in four children in Zimbabwe, 1.6 million, are now orphaned, having lost at least one parent, and this number is growing," UNICEF Zimbabwe representative Festo Kavishe said in a statement sent to Reuters on Tuesday.

"HIV and AIDS have dramatically increased children's vulnerability in recent years to the point where Zimbabwe now has the highest percentage of children who are orphans in the world," Kavishe added.

Last week President Robert Mugabe said Zimbabwe's declining HIV/AIDS prevalence rate showed it was showing the way for Africa in the fight against the scourge.

Health experts attribute the drop to more condom use and the success of programs encouraging people to have fewer sexual partners.

UNICEF said it had received $6 million from Sweden, which would be used to increase school enrolment of orphans and vulnerable children, boost school nutrition programs and reduce the number of children living outside families.

Zimbabwe continued to lead in the care of the orphans and vulnerable children despite a severe economic crisis, with 90 percent of the country's orphans having been absorbed by the extended family, UNICEF said.

Afghan drugs a worry as Pakistanis confront AIDS

Wed Dec 6, 2006 7:09 AM ET

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Afghanistan's booming opium trade is a huge concern for Pakistan as it confronts the spread of HIV/AIDS, especially among intravenous drug users, Pakistan's minister of health said on Wednesday.

Pakistan recorded its first case of HIV infection in 1987 and the number of confirmed cases is now 3,556 -- of whom more than 300 have developed AIDS -- but experts say the true figure could be many times higher.

Health Minister Mohammad Naseer Khan said Pakistan was a low-prevalence but high-risk country when it came to AIDS.

The government was committed to the fight against the disease but efforts had to be intensified to tackle Afghanistan's booming output of opium -- the raw material for heroin, he said.

"We are committed for a strong program to combat HIV/AIDS, especially the IDU users," Khan told a news conference, referring to intravenous drug users.

U.N. Office on Drugs and Crimes said recently that Afghanistan's opium harvest had reached a new record this year with production 50 percent higher than last year.

"Today in Afghanistan, you have highest production of opium to date. Ten years ago it nearly reached zero," said Khan, who attended a U.N. meeting on injecting drug use and HIV/AIDS on Wednesday.

"So that's a huge concern for Pakistan. More has to be done by the government of Afghanistan, and also all the donor agencies and coalition forces to stop that production," he said.

The United Nations had asked Afghanistan's NATO security force to do something about the drug problem, a senior U.N. official said.

"The U.N. is very much concerned," U.N. Resident Coordinator in Pakistan Jan Vandemoortele told the news conference.

"Our program of poppy eradication, of course, is not yielding the results required," he said.

Khan said public information was also vital in the fight against AIDS.

"We don't have to be pornographic about HIV/AIDS but we must tell our children what it is, and how to stay away from it," Khan said.

"In Pakistan, we do not shy away from our responsibilities, it is affecting our children also ... We have a very strong program in the country. We are reaching out to IDUs," he said.

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