The case raises concerns about the safety of China's blood supply.

Chinese authorities say the blood supply in major cities is safe and have ordered all hospitals to use blood from government-run blood banks.

In what is believed to be the first such case in Beijing, the boy's father Sun Ya is demanding more than 860,000 yuan (104,000 US dollars) in compensation for medical fees and psychological damages, the China Daily said Tuesday.

The Beijing Haidian District People's Court has accepted the lawsuit and a court session is scheduled to open in about a month, the report quoted sources as saying.

The Stomatological Hospital, affiliated with Peking University, denied the transfusion infected the boy with HIV, saying blood used was provided by a legal blood center in Beijing.

The director of the hospital's medical affairs department, who gave her surname as Shen, said the boy had also been operated on at Henan hospitals, making it difficult to tell where he was infected, the report said.

The boy, whose name was not revealed, tested positive for HIV after suffering from a serious case of pneumonia last November in central Henan province, where he and his family live, his father claims.

Both the boy's parents tested negative for the virus.

Sun and his wife concluded the blood transfusion -- in August 2002 -- was the one likely source.

Doctors in Henan told Sun to take his son to the Beijing hospital for the operation because it provides better medical treatment.

Experts were quoted as saying it was up to the hospital to prove no tainted blood came from them.

Lawsuits over HIV-tainted blood have surfaced in recent years throughout China. In several cases, patients infected with HIV through transfusion or their relatives have won compensation.

International organizations, including the United Nations, believe China's official figure for the number of HIV infections -- 840,000 -- is far too low, suggesting it is more than one million and could rise to 20 million by 2010.

Officials have said infection through blood transfusions has been basically curbed after the government invested in cleaning up the blood supply.

But in some rural areas, irresponsible or ill-informed doctors reportedly still use unchecked blood they buy from farmers for transfusions rather than blood from blood banks, which costs more.

School policy regarding medical tests for students would also be revised under the settlement, the New York Times reported Sunday. The amount the girls would be paid was not disclosed.

The lawsuit was filed by the New York Civil Liberties Union after the eighth-grade girls cut school last April to attend the party.

When they returned to school the next day, they were called to the principal's office and told they had to be tested for pregnancy, HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, according to the lawsuit. They were told they could not return to school without a doctor's note that included the test results.

The lawsuit claimed the forced tests violated the students' privacy and their right to attend school. Under new guidelines, school officials cannot order such tests or require students to say whether they are pregnant or have a disease, the Times reported.

KAMPALA (AFP) - The United States embassy in Uganda announced that the east African country had received 37 million dollars from Washington's fund to combat AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean region.

The amount already disbursed represented half of what Uganda was to receive from the US Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) this year, according to an embassy statement.

Last year, US President George W. Bush called for the United States to spend 15 billion dollars on HIV/AIDS prevention and research over five years.

Bush had asked for three billion dollars for the first year but Congress appropriated 2.4 billion dollars for HIV/AIDS funding in fiscal 2004.

In Uganda, the money will be spent on expanding existing HIV/AIDS programmes, including making antiretroviral treatments available to 60,000 HIV-positive Ugandans and another and 300,000 AIDS sufferers receiving care and support.

An estimated 1.2 million Ugandans are infected with HIV and some two million children have lost their parents to AIDS, according to official figures.

The condoms were picked up during trials of a free distribution drive begun by the Delhi AIDS Control Society.

Banners were also put up in the various departments about AIDS awareness and the free distribution.

"The response to the banners has been phenomenal," said Piyush Jain, the Society's deputy director (condoms). We are exhausting our stocks twice as fast."

Jain said on an average his department distributes about 4,000 condoms among staffers every month when they are placed in offices.

"Even women employees are coming. And no one is blushing," said a man sitting behind a condom machine.

With more than 4.6 million HIV-infected people, India has the second-highest rate of HIV infections in the world after South Africa.

"I believe AIDS is 100 percent preventable, and anything we can do to get that message out will help," Mooney said on Goree Island, just off the coast of Senegal's capital, Dakar.

Mooney, a communications officer at the College of Advanced Technology in New York City, has spent years rowing the waters around New York out of a lifelong love for the sport.

Now, after losing loved ones to AIDS, he says he is eager to raise awareness — and money — for the cause.

Other professional rowers have crossed the Atlantic Ocean before, but most began in places like Spain's Canary Islands, farther north off Africa's western coast, Mooney said.

"I didn't feel a connection to the Canary Islands, so I looked on the map and saw Goree and said this will be where I will start from — the history of my ancestors," Mooney said Thursday, midway through a six-day trip to Senegal, his first to West Africa.

Tourists with cameras hanging from their necks raised their sunglasses to get a better look at Mooney as he crawled in chains across the sand of the slave house toward the rowing machine.

The Goree Island house is said to have been one of countless West African departure points for slaves headed across the Atlantic.

Mooney estimates it will take two to three months to cross to Brazil, and from there, another five months to ply north through the Caribbean and up along the eastern coast of the United States to New York.

The 8,000-mile route was chosen to pay homage to the millions of African slaves who were forced to make the journey in shackles to the Americas, Mooney said. The Feb. 1 start date coincides with the beginning of Black History Month in the United States.

Mooney plans to travel in a 24-foot-long plywood boat stocked with military rations and equipped with a satellite phone and an Internet link so others can follow along online. Another larger support boat will trail behind to videotape the voyage, but will not provide any aid unless there is an emergency, Mooney said.

The undertaking — scheduled for Feb. 5, 2005 — will not be cheap. Mooney estimates the cost at $200,000. Corporate and other sponsors have chipped in $3,000.

All money raised above the cost amount will be donated to HIV/AIDS charities around the world, Mooney said.

Sub-Saharan Africa is home to 26.6 million of the between 34 million and 46 million people worldwide living with HIV, according to U.N. figures.

The Global Coalition on Women and AIDS, a grouping of organizations and individuals, also aims to address violence against females and legal and social inequalities that make women more vulnerable to HIV/AIDS. "We have to make it an issue," Dr. Peter Piot, executive director of the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), said in an interview.

"We want to tell these women that all these injustices and discrimination have become more lethal because of AIDS."

The coalition hopes to initiate changes at all levels that will reduce women's vulnerability to HIV/AIDS and increase their ability to deal with it and its consequences.

Award-winning actress Emma Thompson, Mary Robinson, former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, and other prominent women in academia, the public sector, and U.N. agencies in countries around the globe will be participating in the coalition.

Piot said the need for a coalition on women and AIDS became clear a year or more ago because prevention methods recommending abstinence, being faithful and using a condom were totally irrelevant for women who are infected by their husbands.

"Marriage is no protection against AIDS," said Piot.

AIDS has rampaged across the globe but sub-Saharan Africa, with up to 28.2 million adults and children with the virus, has been the most badly affected.

Women in Africa are at least 1.2 times more likely to be infected with HIV than boys or men. For young women and girls the figure is 2.5 times higher.

Females are more vulnerable because the virus is more easily transmitted from men to women than the other way around. Women have sex earlier and generally with older partners. Sexual violence against women, including rape and physical abuse, also increase the risk of infection.

In South Africa, 20-48 percent of girls aged 10-25 report their first sexual encounter was forced. Most children are infected by their mothers during pregnancy, birth or through breast feeding.

Inequitable property and inheritance rights in many countries also make it impossible for women to leave their husbands even if they know he may be HIV positive. Widows also lose part or all of their assets, including their home and land, to relatives which can increase their vulnerability to HIV/AIDS.

BRAZZAVILLE (AFP) - The WHO on Friday called on African countries to recognize female genital mutilation as a violation of women's rights, saying that over 100 million women in the continent are victims of the practice.

In a message to mark World Day against Genital Mutilation, the World Health Organisation's Africa office said genital mutilation exposed women to a range of irreversible health risks, including HIV/AIDS.

The head of the Brazzaville-based regional office, Malick Samba, said that female genital mutilation is practised in 27 out of the 46 members of the WHO in the region.

He used the day to launch an appeal for "countries and partners to recognize female genital mutilation as an attack on the fundamental rights of girls and women."

"It is estimated that over 100 million girls and women in Africa have suffered a form of genital mutilation and every year two million more are exposed to the risk of mutilation," said Samba.

"Female genital mutilation has serious and often irreversible consequences on the health and survival of girls and women. These can include haemmorrhage, difficulties urinating and giving birth as well as infections like HIV/AIDS," he added.

Female genital mutilation (FGM), also called female circumcision or excision, is a deeply rooted cultural tradition intended in part to preserve a woman's chastity, and usually carried out without the aid of anesthesia.

The painful practice, traditionally seen as controlling female sexuality and making a girl more "marriageable", typically involves cutting off the clitoris and other parts of the genitalia in girls, and often sewing the vagina shut.

By DULUE MBACHU, Associated Press Writer

LAGOS, Nigeria - A government program to provide cheap medicine for people infected with HIV has run out of supplies, jeopardizing more than 14,000 who began taking the drugs two years ago, AIDS activists said Tuesday.

A top health official in Nigeria — one of the top African nations affected by HIV, the virus that causes AIDS — acknowledged that the AIDS program had exhausted its medication supplies but said the government has ordered more.

AIDS Alliance Nigeria, the country's main organization of people with the disease, the program is plagued by corruption and mismanagement. Among other problems, activists said, drugs handed out have expired and there have been repeated shortages.

"They're directing us to private pharmacies where most of us can't afford the costs," said Tina Uzo, a 38-year-old mother of four whose husband died of AIDS. "A lot of people are dying."

Health Minister Eyitayo Lambo was described as unavailable when The Associated Press contacted his office for a response.

A senior health official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, acknowledged Nigeria's antiretroviral program was "in crisis" but denied corruption.

An estimated 3.5 million Nigerians are either infected with HIV or show symptoms of AIDS.

President Olusegun Obasanjo's government started the drug program in 2002 following charges that Nigeria was doing little to nothing to help victims.

The program was meant to provide drugs that delay the onset of full-blown AIDS — although only 10,000 Nigerians were to be helped, a tiny fraction of those infected.

When the program began in 2002, more than 14,000 people signed up to receive antiretroviral drugs from 25 government treatment centers at less than $8.30 a month, compared to the $100 they would have paid at pharmacies.

Alliance activists said treatment centers had handed out expired drugs or turned patients away, telling them the medicine had run out. At centers that still had medication stocks, corrupt officials were often demanding bribes, activists said.

Health officials told those seeking the drugs that the extra payments were "for tea," said Lt. Commodore Nsikak Ekpe, the president of the alliance.

Some patients, unable to afford the market price, had gone without medication for three months, Ekpe and others said.

The senior health official said funds had not been released in time to replenish the drug stocks, but added that new consignments had been ordered from India.

Expired drugs had been dispensed at a few treatment centers where doctors felt it was still safe to use them within two months of their expiration dates, the official said.

In Geneva, Andy Seale, an adviser to the Joint U.N. program on HIV/AIDS, said interruptions in the drug regime could lead to the virus developing resistance to the drugs.

"Even if someone were to miss one or two doses taken every 12 hours, they risk developing resistance," Seale said. "It's a concern when the drug supply is broken."