The lack of suitable doctors is partly responsible for many patients dropping out of the program because they cannot handle the side effects, including vomiting and diarrhoea.

"We have enough drugs but we don't have enough doctors who can administer the drugs," said Zhang Fujie, head of the program run by China's Center for Disease Control.

"Even in the biggest cities in China, there are only a few hospitals with doctors who can administer AIDS drugs," said Zhang, who estimated China had fewer than 100 such experts.

The program, which began three months ago, is being carried out as China faces growing criticism for its tough tactics against rural AIDS sufferers demanding government help.

In one incident that raised concern, police indiscriminately beat and arrested 13 people from Xiongqiao village in central Henan province during a night raid.

Experts estimate as many as one million farmers contracted HIV/AIDS from government-approved blood-collection stations in this area.

The free-drugs program highlights the two-pronged approach different levels of government in China seem to be taking, experts said.

Unable to afford the latest AIDS cocktail treatment drugs from international pharmaceutical companies, China earlier this year began manufacturing four types of drugs whose patents have expired, Zhang said.

The government is now giving the drugs -- AZT, DDI, D4T and MVT -- along with two imported drugs -- Stocrin and Combivir -- to patients in the provinces of Henan, Hubei, Hunan, Anhui and Sichuan.

Some 2,550 people in Henan's Shangcai county started getting the drugs in early April, while around 200 have been given them in Xincai county and 120 in Queshan county, Zhang said.

China has said 23 of its 31 provinces have farmers who became infected with HIV from selling blood, but has never revealed the precise numbers.

In an indication of the extent of the problem, which China kept quiet about until December 2001, Zhang said several hundred more people are being treated in the other provinces and the program is expected to expand.

In Anhui province, 200 people are being treated, in Hubei province 420 people, in Sichuan 61 and a program was just launched in Hunan.

A US-based AIDS worker said many people, however, were stopping treatment because the drugs China is able to provide cause strong side effects.

"They're using older versions of drugs that can make up a cocktail treatment and specifically the ones where the patents have expired," said the worker.

"But they're not as effective and they have side effects. The side effects are so serious that a lot of people are dropping out."

In Henan's Shangcai county alone, 327 people have quit the program, Zhang admitted.

But he argued that the drugs were still effective and used around the world.

"Domestically made medicine is not the best, but we're talking about how to help the largest number of people under scarce resources," he said.

"It's not a matter of which is best. If one has the money, one can buy the best. But since the government is buying, not everyone should expect a BMW."

A bigger problem is the lack of qualified doctors, who are needed to help patients stay on the lifelong treatment, he said.

China is applying for a grant from the UN-sponsored Global Fund, which it wants to use to help train doctors.

But Zhang and international workers helping China obtain more funding said incidents such as the night raid may hurt the chances of getting assistance.

Without knowing the specifics of what happened, Zhang said he could not comment on whether Beijing was aware of the raid or approved it.

Chinese ministries failed to respond to questions sent by AFP about the incident.

PARIS (AFP) - Noisy demonstrators demanding funds for HIV drugs in the developing world disrupted a major conference on AIDS, but in doing so gained the beaming support of former South African president Nelson Mandela.

Mandela had just finished a speech Monday, demanding access to drugs, and had remained onstage for a prolonged standing ovation when about a dozen activists in the audience unfurled a protest banner and chanted slogans.

The banner read "AIDS donors' lies kill" and they chanted "Treat the six million -- where's the 10 billion?"

That was reference to six million people with HIV who are urgently in need of anti-retroviral drugs, and the 10 billion dollars needed annually, according to some estimates, to tackle the global HIV/AIDS pandemic pandemic.

Mandela remained on the podium as the noisy but peaceful protest began, smiled broadly when he read the banner and then clapped along enthusiastically in time with the chant.

One of the protestors, Gaelle Krikorian, vice president of the Paris chapter of the campaign group ACT UP, climbed up on stage to speak to Mandela.

"I told him we need your backing, we need your help. We are at a critical moment," she told AFP. "He said he supported us."

Mandela and other speakers remained on stage for a while, flanked by two security guards, eventually leaving after the house lights went up and the 5,000 participants left the plenary hall.

The four-day Paris meeting, which opened on Sunday, mainly gathers scientists.

The event, which is co-hosted by the International AIDS Society in Stockholm takes place every two years, alternating with the International AIDS Conference.

AIDS conferences are a traditional forum for rowdy but non-violent protests, aimed at principally at large pharmaceutical companies and donor countries.

Speaking on the eve of a meeting of partners in the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, US Secretary of Health Tommy Thompson said the threatened shortfall "is going to be a serious problem."

"The United States has contributed the vast amount of dollars so far and I am hopeful that this meeting today and tomorrow is going to encourage a lot more countries to contribute," he told reporters Tuesday.

"It's obvious that we all need to do a little bit because we do not have enough dollars this year in order to meet our commitments. I can't tell you the exact amount but it is somewhere in the neighbourhood of 500 to 800 million dollars," or between 440 and 710 million euros.

The Fund is an independent entity gathering donor and beneficiary countries, the private sector, non-governmental organisations and local communities.

It was set up in 2002 with the idea of pooling public and private resources and providing swift relief to people suffering from three infectious diseases that last year claimed some six million lives.

Ani Soni, advisor to the fund's executive director, told AFP that the Fund was expected to grant around 4.9 billion dollars for operations from 2002-2004, but so far has only received pledges of 2.6 billion.

Of the 2.3 billion dollars needed, "around 600 million" was required for 2003, with the rest needed for next year, he said.

Thompson, who is also chairman of the Fund's board, said he did want to "start pointing fingers... I do not want to embarrass anybody or embarrass any country" and added there was "cautious optimism" for believing the money would be found.

The United States has so far provided about a third of the total contributions to the Fund, and has launched a parallel 15-billion-dollar initiative, spread over five years, which is aimed specifically at HIV/AIDS and at 14 countries in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean.

Wednesday's meeting of the Fund is co-chaired by Thompson and France's minister for cooperation, Pierre-Andre Wiltzer.

It coincides with a four-day meeting in Paris, ending on Wednesday, of a scientific forum on AIDS co-hosted by the International AIDS Society.

But U.S. officials at an international AIDS conference said Washington would buy lower cost generics if they were cost-effective, despite industry concerns the copied versions of patented drugs undermine innovation.

"We certainly want to get the highest quality at the lowest price," said Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and one of the architects of the U.S. AIDS plan.

"That may mean getting it from the (brand-name) companies who bring their price low enough so it is feasible to be part of the program. It does not exclude generic drugs ... there will be a number of different approaches depending on the country."

HIV, the virus which causes AIDS, has infected 42 million people worldwide, nearly three-quarters of them in Africa where modern life-saving antiretroviral medicines are out of reach to the vast majority.

Fauci was sharing a platform with Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson, who urged other countries to follow the U.S. lead in doing more in the fight against AIDS.

FUND SHORTFALL

Thompson also chairs the board of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria -- launched a year ago at the behest of U.N Secretary-General Kofi Annan -- which holds a separate meeting for donors in Paris on Wednesday.

He said he was "cautiously optimistic" the fund would raise some new money this year but it would fall $500-800 million short of the amount needed to fund all the programs due to be approved by its scientific experts in 2003.

"We will be short ... It's obvious that we all need to do a little bit more because we do not enough dollars this year to meet our commitments," Thompson said.

The Global Fund hopes to tap not only governments but also the private sector to boost resources. Thompson said he plans an African tour with business people in December to raise cash.

Hopes for this week's donor's conference in Paris have taken a knock following a decision by the European Union not to pledge any new money.

Explaining the move in Brussels, European Commission head spokesman Reijo Kemppinen said Europe as a whole had played its part by pledging a total of $2.56 billion to the fund.

French President Jacques Chirac and British Prime Minister Tony Blair had urged other leaders to promise up to $1 billion at the Paris talks after the U.S. authorized that amount.

The U.S. offer is dependent on its contribution not exceeding more than one third of the total -- a condition meant to encourage other countries to give more.

On a party line vote, the House Appropriations Committee defeated a bid by Democrats to add $1 billion to bring next year's spending up to the $3 billion called for in legislation creating the HIV/AIDS program that Bush signed in May.

On his trip last week to AIDS-ravaged Africa, Bush repeatedly touted his $15 billion, five-year year initiative to confront the pandemic.

Democrats said he and his aides implied that he wanted $3 billion for the program next year, and that Congress would be to blame for any shortfall.

But Bush requested just $2 billion for the program in the spending bills the Appropriations Committees write that fund the program.

"The president has raised the expectations that we will supply billions of dollars in aid in the coming years and specifically $3 billion next year," said Rep. Nita Lowey of New York, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Foreign Aid subcommittee.

Lowey said Bush and his top aides "repeatedly left the distinct impression that Congress -- not the president -- is to blame for not providing the full $3 billion level."

But the committee defeated her amendment to add $1 billion to the initiative for next year by 33-28.

Rep. James Kolbe, an Arizona Republican who chairs the foreign aid subcommittee, said he expected the full $15 billion will be provided over the life of the program.

The $2 billion for next fiscal year that starts on Oct. 1 -- up from the current $1.56 billion -- will be enough to start the program, he said.

LISBON (Reuters) - The U.N. food agency said on Friday that in less than a decade there will be 20 million AIDS orphans in sub-Saharan Africa without parents to feed them.

The World Food Program's executive director James Morris said 11 million AIDS orphans already without a mother or father to cultivate crops in southern Africa would be joined by another nine million in seven years.

"If you go to a family that is touched by AIDS, the first thing they will ask you for is food to feed their family. Food is the critical ingredient in keeping an individual healthy to resist AIDS," he told a news conference in Lisbon.

The WFP earlier this month launched an appeal for $308 million to fund 540,000 tons of aid to prevent starvation in Zimbabwe, Malawi, Zambia, Mozambique, Lesotho and Swaziland.

"What I am most concerned about today is the issue of HIV/AIDS in Africa, especially as it relates to children, families and agriculture," he said.

Morris added that AIDS sufferers also needed to be well fed to fight off the deadly disease, which threatens to wipe out the bulk of southern Africa's economically active population if current trends continue.

"To see half the families in Africa led by somebody in their seventies, because all the parents are gone--the impact of this on food production is immense," he added.

The WFP aims to halve the 800 million people who go hungry by 2015, but had been under additional strain this year from war in Iraq and Liberia, and famine in the Horn of Africa.

Morris said the WFP needed to spend one billion euros ($1.12 billion) more this year than last, and its 2003 budget for Africa was bigger than for the whole world in 2002.

But he was optimistic that Iraq, with all of its 27 million people currently being fed by the WFP, in the biggest operation of its kind, would be less of a burden in the near future.

"Iraq, because of the magnitude of the enterprise, is a huge undertaking...it's unprecedented," Morris said. "Hopefully, in six months from now, Iraq will be back on its own and able to feed itself."

By Emelia Sithole

PARIS (Reuters) - The World Health Organization (WHO) called on Tuesday for free anti-tuberculosis drugs to be made widely available to HIV sufferers, who are especially hard hit by the highly infectious disease.

About a third of the 42 million people living with the AIDS virus also have TB and the WHO says 90 percent of them will die within a few months unless they get treatment.

"It's essentially immoral not to make this cheap and effective treatment of TB widely available, particularly to those infected with HIV/AIDS," WHO acting director Mario Raviglione told a news conference.

In a report released at the International Aids Society conference in Paris, the WHO said it was short of $3.8 billion for a $9.1 billion five-year plan to halt the spread of tuberculosis by 2005.

"The WHO is calling for free anti-TB drugs and quality care to be made widely available for people living with HIV, along with renewed efforts to increase access to anti-retrovirals in developing countries," it said in a statement.

The report, released a day before a donors' meeting on the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, presents harrowing pictures of the ravages of the disease which the WHO says can be treated by a course of drugs costing $10 per patient, but every year infects eight million and causes two million deaths.

Winstone Zulu, a Zambian activist who was the first person in the southern African country to declare publicly that he was HIV-positive, told the news conference he was lucky to be alive today.

He was saved by a friend who bought the life-prolonging anti-TB drugs for him from South Africa after he contracted the disease in 1997.

His four brothers were not so fortunate. They have all died of TB over the years because they had no easy access to the drugs and at times could not afford them.

NO EXCUSE

"We have no excuse... The drugs cost less than $10," Zulu told reporters.

Zulu and Raviglione criticized the treatment by some governments of the AIDS and TB problems as two separate issues.

"Ten years after an unprecedented declaration of a global tuberculosis emergency by WHO, the TB epidemic has grown even worse, primarily due to the spread of HIV," Raviglione said.

"We need to increase our efforts to address the deadly synergy between the two diseases, each of which is fueling the other's impact," he said.

HIV sufferers are more vulnerable to TB bacteria because the AIDS virus attacks the immune system.

The WHO warned in a statement that an even greater TB/HIV crisis might be emerging in India, where the AIDS virus is rapidly spreading in the country with the highest caseload worldwide of TB infections.

India has 4.5 million people infected with TB, with 1.8 million new cases being reported each year.

HIV is also causing a six percent annual increase in the number of TB cases across sub-Saharan Africa, the WHO said.

Sub-Saharan Africa is home to an estimated 30 million people living with HIV/AIDS and the WHO says 70 percent of those infected with HIV have no access to anti-TB drugs.

In South Africa, which has the highest known HIV caseload in the world, the disease kills more than a third of all HIV-infected people, the WHO report said.

"With over 11 percent of the population HIV-positive -- more than five million people -- the disaster is just beginning," it said.

TOKYO (AFP) - The Japanese Red Cross Society (JRC) has found the first case of an HIV-infected man donating blood without being detected by a rigorous testing system introduced in 1999, it said.

The man donated blood twice last summer and only tested positive for the virus that causes AIDS on his second test. While the blood from his first donation was not used, it had been stored for potential later use in a blood product.

The revelation comes as the JRC is recalling donated blood after finding 29 people may have been infected with hepatitis B and C through blood transplants.

The health ministry ordered the recall last month after finding the Red Cross was not recalling previous blood samples of people who donated multiple times before testing positive.

It is also waiting for a report from the Red Cross about its investigation of the donation history of multiple donors who have later tested positive for HIV, hepatitis B and C and a type of syphilis.

The HIV patient's first test happened to pass because the virus was present in very small quantities in the early stages of infection, called the "window period", the JRC said.

Because the testing process groups together 50 blood samples, it is possible the virus may not have been included in the test sample, it said.

When his blood was tested separately, it tested positive.

JRC official Hazuhiro Kimura said while the nucleic acid test (NAT), introduced in 1999, had greatly helped in screening donors, it still was not foolproof.

"The window period for HIV has shrunk from 22 days to 11 days, but even so, if someone donates within that period, they will slip through," Kimura said.

The JRC is calling for tougher interviewing procedures to screen donors, such as weeding out those who use the blood donation system as a way to test whether they are HIV positive.

STOCKHOLM (AFP) - A Swedish court sentenced a 27-year-old man who suffers from HIV to four years in prison for having unprotected sex with nine men without informing them that he carried the virus.

Convicted on charges of attempted aggravated assault, the man was also ordered to pay a total of 620,000 kronor (67,000 euros, 75,000 dollars) in damages to the victims, none of whom became infected after their sexual relations.

The man, who tested positive for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in 1996, had both one-night stands and longer sexual relationships with at least 10 men over the course of the past four years without telling them of his condition.

Under Swedish law, HIV and AIDS carriers must inform their sexual partners of their condition.

Nine of the man's lovers were awarded damages ranging from 50,000 to 90,000 kronor each. A tenth man who had safe sex with the man was not included in the damages claim.

In his defense, the HIV-infected man said he thought he was not at risk of transmitting the disease because his condition had become almost undetectable thanks to his medication.