BEIJING (AFP) - The UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) urged China to treat AIDS as a general public health issue and not just a problem affecting a small group of people.

"Service, prevention, information and treatment are all remaining challenges for China. I think China has at least broken through the silence barrier, now it has to see it as a China-wide challenge," she said Thursday.

China estimates it has 840,000 HIV/AIDS sufferers although international AIDS experts say the actual number is much higher and more needs to be done to prevent it exploding.

In the past, China has been criticised for being slow to recognise the problem, although high-profile visits in recent years by the country's top leaders to AIDS patients have signalled a more urgent approach.

Bellamy, speaking after a ceremony in which China gave UNICEF 6.5 million dollars for the Asia tsunami victims, said UNICEF's projects in China were changing in line with the country's fast development.

She said the government was now more interested in technical assistance than financial help.

"The Clinton Foundation is keen to strengthen its cooperation to the HIV-AIDS program in China and is working with the WHO, UN AIDS and other health partners along with the Chinese government," Wadia told AFP.

"They hope to strengthen their presence here in China over the next year."

China estimates it has 840,000 HIV/AIDS sufferers although international AIDS experts say the actual number is much higher and urgent action is needed to prevent it exploding.

Clinton would also discuss China's aid efforts to the tsunami-hit countries following his four-nation tour of the region which ended earlier this week, Wadia said.

During a stopover in Hong Kong Tuesday, the former president said he would recommend that Washington's aid efforts to the nations hit by the December 26 tragedy should continue for three to five years.

"I was impressed by the achievements made and the scale of the job yet to be done," Clinton told reporters. "I will recommend that American aid efforts continue in the region for at least three to five years."

Clinton and fellow former president George Bush senior were appointed by President George W. Bush to head US private fundraising efforts in the wake of the tsunamis that killed some 289,000 people in 11 countries in Asia and Africa.

Beijing-based diplomats said China was keen to keep Clinton's visit quiet, irked by his scheduled visit to Taiwan, possibly this month, where he is expected to meet independence-leaning President Chen Shui-bian.

China's foreign mininstry and health ministry refused to comment on the visit, as did the Clinton Foundation in Beijing.

China views Chen as a dangerous "splittist" who is leading Taiwan down the road toward formal independence, a move that Beijing said would be regarded as an act of war.

A Department of Health statement said a record 268 news cases were recorded in 2004, a 17 percent increase on the 229 reported in 2003.

Two-thirds were infected by sexual transmission, the statement added.

The figures brought the total number of HIV and AIDS cases in the southern Chinese enclave to about 3,000, the statement said.

Government consultant Dr S.S. Lee said HIV infection had increased partly as a result of easier movement between Hong Kong and China, where AIDS is a growing problem.

"The high HIV rates in neighbouring cities, extensive human mobility across borders and the practice of risk behaviour are some of the factors that may predispose Hong Kong to an upsurge of the epidemic," Lee said.

HIV infection through drug injection had also risen, by 7.8 percent, in line with the introduction in January 2004 of compulsory screening at methadone clinics, he said.

Thanks to the continued use of antiretroviral drugs, the statement said, the number of full-blown AIDS cases reported in 2004 fell to 56 from 49 the year before. It is the lowest number since 1996 when the medication was introduced.

MANILA (AFP) - Sweden and the Asian Development Bank signed an agreement to set up a multi-donor trust fund to help developing countries in the Asia Pacific region fight HIV/AIDS.

Intended to be a multi-donor facility running for an initial period of four years, the fund will finance new subregional and national HIV/AIDS interventions falling into three major categories -- pilot demonstration projects, leadership strengthening and evidence-based capacity building -- and program coordination, technical support, and monitoring.

ADB President Haruhiko Kuroda said that HIV/AIDS presents a fundamental development challenge that devastates people's lives and is a threat to Asia's economic development and poverty reduction.

"I am pleased to be formalizing this partnership with Sweden on one of the most urgent issues of our time," Kuroda said.

"This is an exciting initiative that, among other things, will help to support some of the activities under the memorandum of understanding signed with UNAIDS on Monday."

Sweden's HIV/AIDS Ambassador Lennarth Hjelmaker, who signed on behalf of the Swedish government, said AIDS had become a top priority on the development agenda for his country, along with sexual and reproductive health and rights.

"HIV/AIDS is not only a medical problem, but an economic and social problem that challenges development and poverty eradication: it covers all sectors of society," he said.

All activities financed under the fund will be monitored and evaluated regularly by the ADB, in collaboration with the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) and other donors that may join the fund.

Hjelmaker was in Manila to attend a conference, organized by the Swedish government, on HIV/AIDS in the Philippines.

Branded an alarmist by some scientists and the homosexual community, Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Laboratory director David Ho, said the findings of his team of researchers justified raising the alarm.

"I think we have a unique convergence of a very drug-resistant virus, and this infection was very, very rapid," he said referring to a 45-year-old homosexual patient. "And this man has many, many sexual partners," he told the 12th Retrovirus Conference here on Thursday.

The AIDS case was first reported on February 11 by New York's public health commissioner.

Conference organizers invited Ho to present the latest conclusions of his researchers to some 3,800 AIDS experts from around the world.

Ho said the newly discovered AIDS virus was a very rare strain even for the Los Alamos laboratory, which has gathered data of the gene sequences of all known AIDS viruses.

Although he is still unsure whether the new HIV strain is an isolated case or not, Ho insisted it was right to notify New York health authorities of the finding.

While drug-resistant strains of the HIV virus are often less infectious than those that respond well to drugs, Ho said this may not be the case with the new virus.

The fact that the virus replicated well in the laboratory, he said, was "worrisome."

Infection rates among whites increased 0.33 percent to 0.43 percent over the same period, a statistically insignificant variation, CDC scientist Geraldine McQuillan said at a press conference Friday on the sidelines of the 12th annual conference on retroviruses.

The data was drawn from a representative sample of the US population which however excluded members of the military, the prison population and homeless people.

The infection rate was highest among 40 to 49 year olds while holding at an encouragingly low 1.5 percent among younger people, McQuillan said.

Researchers said socio-economic factors like poverty, drugs and limited access to health care were behind the racial disparity.

Meanwhile, almost half of HIV-positive Americans are not treated with antiretroviral drugs -- which suppress although they do not eliminate the virus which causes AIDS, according to another study published here Friday.

An analysis of national data and CDC reports showed that 480,000 HIV-positive Americans aged 15 to 49 should have been treated with antiretroviral drugs in 2003, but only 268,000 or 56 percent of them were, according to researcher Eyasu Teshale.

Most of those who went untreated had not yet been diagnosed, he said.

About one million people have AIDS and about 40,000 people test positive for HIV annually in the United States. There are more than 18,000 AIDS-related deaths each year.

Globally, the pandemic touches 39 million people, most of them in Africa, and more than three million died in 2004, according to UN figures.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - US law and AIDS experts urged the Indian parliament to reject an executive order that will curb India's ability to sell cheap copies of the newest drugs for the world's poorest patients.

The Indian parliament will debate the new December 26 order, which changed its laws to put India in line with World Trade Organization (WTO) rules on intellectual property rights.

Until its new rule, the South Asian giant had not recognized international drug patents, thereby leaving its pharmaceutical industry with a half-million-strong workforce free to copy foreign products.

India is the world's third-biggest producer and prime exporter of generic drugs, which are cheaper than drugs sold under patent.

The experts said the Indian parliament should either amend the order or let it die when it expires after six months in order to take time to revise it and improve it.

"Hundreds of millions of lives are at stake," said Brook Baker, a law professor at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, and a policy adviser to the Health Global Access Project, an activist organization seeking worldwide access to HIV/AIDS treatment.

"People need access to the newest medicine," Baker said. "This ordinance cannot and should not stand."

The new ordinance could hurt public health programs in Africa, a continent plagued by AIDS cases, experts said.

"This is really about our ability to get these life-saving medicines in the mouths of people that urgently need them," said Paul Zeitz, executive director of US-based Global AIDS Alliance.

African and Indian activists, along with AIDS organizations, will hold a rally Saturday in front of India's embassy in Washington to show solidarity with similar protests to be held in India.

The so-called "A.C.C.R - AIDS Cure Compound Remedy" is being advertised on a pamphlet circulated in the eastern Johannesburg suburbs, urging infected people to call immediately "to avoid disappointment".

The Johannesburg-based Citizen newspaper Friday printed a copy of the pamphlet which says: "This is not a joke. The cure for HIV/AIDS is here. This is your chance to be free of this killer virus."

South Africa has the highest HIV/AIDS caseload in the world, with 5.3 million people, or one in five adults, living with HIV and AIDS, according to UN figures.

Earlier in the week the local 702 Talk Radio station reported that a man called Dannie Binneman offering the "wonder drug" for 550 rand (94 dollars / 71 euros) per treatment.

Binneman apparently asks callers to pay upfront even though the drugs would only be available in the next few weeks.

He claims that the drug works wonders because it is "made of ozone" and that it has already cured 39 people, the newspaper reported.

"We have heard of the pamphlet. The health department condemns in the strongest terms anyone who claims that he or she has a cure for AIDS," provincial health spokesman Popo Maja told AFP.

"These quacks are feeding off people's confusion about the disease," added AIDS activist Nathan Geffen.

BOSTON, United States (AFP) - Condom use and multiple-drug "cocktails" have slowed the spread of AIDS cases in certain African countries, a global AIDS conference in Boston was told.

However, conferees at the 12th annual Conference on Retrovirus and Opportunistic Infections were told that a large increase in availability of so-called "tri-therapy" of anti-retroviral drugs is needed urgently to slow the spread of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

"In the last six months of 2004, the number of people under tri-therapy has doubled in Africa," said World Health Organization official Jim Kim.

"But we need to scale up (that effort) rapidly," he said.

According to a 10-year study, Uganda saw a 30 percent fall in infection rates, especially where HIV patients received the three-drug cocktails.

The findings were important in showing how the AIDS pandemic might be slowed in sub-Saharan Africa, where more than 60 percent of the 39.4 million HIV-infected people in the world live. More than three million people died of AIDS around the world in 2004.

Maria Wawer, a professor at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health in New York, said that although there were no significant changes in sexual activity among those being surveyed in the 1994-2003 Uganda study, the drug treatments and condom usage helped lower infection rates.

"We observed no increase in abstinence or monogamy" in the Uganda study, said Wawer. "But condom use has increased in casual relationships."

"The group of people who have used condoms consistently have a significantly lower rate of HIV acquisition," she said, pointing to the important doubling of usage among teenagers of 15 to 19 years old.

Wawer declined to explain her mention of abstinence in the context of Washington's anti-AIDS effort. Last year, the administration of President George W. Bush allocated 100 million dollars for promoting, among other things, abstinence as key to beating the spread of HIV.

The WHO's Kim reported to the conference on the results of increased use of tri-therapies to halt AIDS and HIV transmission.

In the final six months of 2004, the number of people worldwide receiving the drug cocktail rose to 700,000 from 44,000, with most of the recipients in African nations including Botswana, Malawi Mozambique and Uganda, he said.

However, he stressed the need to attain the goal set on World AIDS Day in 2003 of making the treatment available to three million people in developing countries by this year.

GUWAHATI, India (AFP) - A four-year-old HIV-positive boy has been kicked out of school in India's northeastern state of Assam under pressure from the parents of his classmates, a rights group said.

The Assam Network of Positive People (ANPP) said it had appealed to the Assam Human Rights Commission to intervene on behalf of the boy.

"This is nothing but a serious crime to have thrown out a little boy from school just because he is HIV-positive," ANPP leader Jahnabi Goswami, who is herself HIV-positive, told AFP.

According to the principal of Sishu Niketan primary school, in the industrial town of Namrup in eastern Assam, some parents had threatened to take their children out of class if the infected boy was allowed to stay.

"We were forced to dismiss him following pressure from other parents whose children were studying in our school," a school management official said.

The parents of the boy had tested HIV-positive five years ago but kept it a secret. When news leaked out, they were ostracized by members of their community.

After the boy was barred from classes, they moved to Assam's main city of Guwahati where they are undergoing treatment at a city hospital.

"Soon after the news broke the family was virtually ostracized, with the couple, who run a small business, shocked to find their regular customers looking the other way," another ANPP member said.

In a similar incident two HIV-positive children were thrown out of school in the southern Indian state of Kerala in 2003 after parents of other students protested.

Government figures put the number of people living with HIV-AIDS in Indian at 5.1 million -- second only to South Africa -- although health workers say the number is much higher.

Some 100,000 HIV-positive people live in India's northeast, which borders the heroin-producing "Golden Triangle" of Laos, Myanmar and Thailand and has high rates of intravenous drug use.

The 33-year-old, who won the title late Saturday, told AFP: "October the 10th, 2000 was the day my world was turned around when I was told that I am HIV positive.

"I went through all sorts of emotions -- denial, anger, resentment, despair. I never thought I -- beautiful and intelligent -- would get the virus. For me the virus was for poor, ignorant and uneducated people."

Leshomo said:" But here I am today. HIV knows no boundaries. I am a living example that being HIV positive is not the end of the world."

The councillor said she would use her one-year reign as beauty queen to encourage others to test for their HIV status and focus on the plight of HIV positive children.

"They are our children, we infected them. I want to teach them about the importance of adherence to ARV medication and tell them that it is alright and they are not different from those who are HIV negative."

In 2002, Botswana became the first country in Africa to offer free life-prolonging anti-retroviral drugs. A little over 21,000 people are now enrolled in the 23 sites of the "Masa" ARV program -- which means New Dawn in the Setswana language -- and nine more clinics are due to open soon.

Botswana's fight against AIDS is closely watched as success here could help efforts under way elsewhere in southern Africa -- in Swaziland, now the world's worst affected country, according to the UN AIDS agency, and South Africa, which has the largest number of citizens living with the disease.

AIDS activists say the government is realising that drugs and testing centers do not provide all of the answers.