A Chinese woman who contracted AIDS from a hospital blood transfusion was detained on suspicion of a serious crime after she asked the health ministry for more compensation, an activist said.

Postal worker Li Xige was detained by police in her home county of Ningling in the central province of Henan, said Wan Yanhai, director of Beijing Aizhixing Institute of Health Education, a non-governmental group.

Li, who was infected with HIV while giving birth to her first child in 1995, had appeared at the health ministry in Beijing on Tuesday along with eight other HIV sufferers, including a child, Wan said in a statement.

They had intended peacefully to petition the ministry for better compensation but apparently they were taken in by authorities and driven back to Henan on Wednesday, according to Wan.

On Thursday Li's family was informed that she had been officially detained on suspicion of "assembling crowds to attack state organs," Wan said. Two other participants in the failed attempt to petition the government were also detained, while the rest were under police supervision, he said.

Ningling county police declined to comment on the report when contacted by AFP, saying they had not heard about the case.

For the crime of "assembling crowds to attack state organs," ringleaders can be sentenced to between five and 10 years in prison, according to the penal code.

Li did not know she was infected with HIV when having her first baby 11 years ago. The child, a girl, died in 2004. A second child has also been infected.

She said she later found several women who got AIDS from transfusions at the same hospital in Henan.

An estimated 650,000 people in China had the HIV virus at the end of 2005, according to UNAIDS, the United Nations agency spearheading the fight against the disease.

 

Clinton Foundation helps northwest China region fight AIDS

The US-based Clinton Foundation will offer northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region technical and financial support over the next three years in the fight against AIDS, local authorities said Friday.

The Clinton Foundation, set up by former U.S. President Bill Clinton, will provide about 7.2 million yuan (900,000 U.S. dollars) from now to July 2009, according to a memorandum of understanding (MOU) on HIV/AIDS prevention cooperation signed this week between the Foundation and the Xinjiang Health Department.

The Foundation will also offer technical training to help upgrade the professional skills of Xinjiang medical workers in treating and curing AIDS patients, sources with the AIDS Prevention Office of the Xinjiang Health Department said.

Xinjiang is one of the areas in China most affected by AIDS.

In 1995, a first case of AIDS was found in Xinjiang, and by Dec. 15 last year, it had reported 11,303 HIV carriers - ranking fourth in the nation.

According to the official website of the Xinjiang Health Department, 83 people have died from the disease.

In April 2004, the Clinton Foundation signed a memorandum of understanding with China's Health Ministry, promising to provide China with technical assistance in AIDS care and treatment.

In addition to Xinjiang, the Clinton Foundation is cooperating with southwest China's Yunnan Province to prevent AIDS.

The three-year cooperative programs with Yunnan were launched on June 20 last year and aim to deliver high-quality care and treatment for HIV/AIDS patients in areas like Dali, Gejiu, Kaiyuan and Lincang.

It is estimated that currently China has about 650,000 HIV/AIDS cases, including 75,000 AIDS patients, according to the 2005 Update on the HIV/AIDS Epidemic and Response in China issued by the Ministry of Health earlier this year.

Source: Xinhua

 

The small West African state of Togo has almost halved its HIV/AIDS infection rate in the past year, but less than a third of those needing life prolonging treatment are getting it, a cabinet statement said on Saturday.

The number of people infected with HIV fell to 3.2 percent of adults in 2006, from 6 percent a year earlier, it said.

However, of the 18,000 people infected who needed life-prolonging antiretroviral treatment, just 5,400 were currently receiving it, Health Minister Suzanne Aho said.

President Faure Gnassingbe, who succeeded his late father last year as national president and as chair of the national anti-AIDS council, made "an appeal to all citizens to carry on protecting themselves from this disease and all sexually transmitted infections."

The cabinet statement did not say whether the drop was due to mortality among AIDS patients, population growth -- running at nearly 3 percent per year in Togo -- or other factors.

Health ministry figures indicated 120,000 people were infected with HIV. Togo has around 5.5 million people.

So far AIDS has hit sub-Saharan Africa much harder than other regions, although West Africa has escaped the worst of the pandemic, which has seen infection rates in some southern African countries approach 40 percent.

Organization's Crumbling health systems and chronic staff shortages are hampering efforts to provide AIDS sufferers with life-saving drugs, the head of the World Health (WHO) HIV division said on Friday.

Dr Kevin De Cock said Africa, which has been hardest hit by the AIDS epidemic, is short of at least a million healthcare workers and, over the past quarter-century, infrastructures in many countries have eroded.

"If you work in these countries it is very obvious, very quickly, that the elephant in the room is not the current price of drugs," De Cock told Reuters in an interview. "The real obstacle is the fragility of the health systems, particularly in Africa."

The Belgian-born infectious disease expert said bolstering health systems will be a priority for the global agency, along with expanding HIV testing and counseling, maximizing prevention efforts, scaling up treatment and investing in surveillance, monitoring and research.

Although the WHO failed to meet its target of getting 3 million people on AIDS drugs by the end of 2005, De Cock said the 1.3 million that were on treatment by the deadline represented an eight-fold increase in Africa and three fold worldwide since end-2003.

Most of the estimated 40 million people living with HIV/AIDS live in sub-Saharan Africa.

"Treatment for AIDS is a legitimate aspiration for everybody in the world no matter where they live or how poor they are," De Cock said. "There is no going back on that."

The real challenge now, he added, is to sustain the momentum, to push for universal access to AIDS drugs and to get the political commitment to rebuild healthcare systems that have crumbled in the past 20-25 years.

"You have health infrastructure that is dilapidated, a health workforce that is demoralized, labs that don't work, supply chains that don't exist and diagnostics that are missing," he said. "And in parallel with that, you have had the emergence of the AIDS epidemic."

To try to tackle the shortage of well-trained workers, De Cock said the WHO will launch a healthcare workers' initiative at the XVI International AIDS Conference in Toronto, Canada from August 13-18.

The initiative, called "Treat, Train and Retain," aims to address the problems, which are acute in Africa which has 24 percent of the global burden of disease but only 3 percent of health workers commanding less than 1 percent of world health expenditure.

"These are long-term issues but they are crucial," said De Cock. "The whole issue of getting long-term treatment out to people puts into very brutal focus this issue of infrastructure, personnel and systems."

Pakistan has recruited Muslim clerics in a new campaign to raise awareness of AIDS in order to reach out to tens of thousands of people suffering either in silence or ignorance because of taboos in its conservative Islamic society.

Although there are only 3,297 reported cases of HIV/AIDS in Pakistan, the officials in the national AIDS control program reckon the real number of cases would be over 80,000.

"The reported ones are just the tip of the iceberg," Qamar-ul-Islam Siddiqi, a program coordinator, told Reuters.

"We have enlisted the help of religious leaders and clerics and printed specific material of Koranic teachings in order to reach the majority of Pakistan's 160 million people," Islam said.

A reference book and posters with Koranic verses stress the need for compassion and care in dealing with people suffering from the disease, and observe Islamic teachings against sex outside marriage.

Other Islamic countries like Indonesia and Egypt have translated the Pakistani material for use in their own national programs.

A senior leader of the country's main religious opposition party, Jamaat-e-Islami, Dr Iqbal Khalil has used the reference book to prepare sermons for Friday prayers.

"We are encouraging even strict clerics in northwestern areas to deliver this model sermon to create more awareness among the people," Khalil said.

There is a very low incidence of reported cases from Pakistan's northwest, but the number of unreported cases is believed to be far higher as many Pakistani migrant workers in the Middle East hail from either this region or the villages of central Punjab province.

"Many of them are deported (from the Middle East) after tested HIV positive. It is very important to make them aware of the risk they pose to their families and to change their lifestyle," Dr Adnan Khan, a consultant with the program said.

The Pakistan government launched its program in 1995 but Islam said it had been difficult to create awareness due to the social and religious constraints and the stigma attached to

AIDS.

Many Pakistanis only associate the disease with sex outside marriage which is strictly prohibited in Islam, and are ignorant of the other ways in which it can be transmitted, namely through contaminated blood or sharing needles for injections.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced $287 million in grants on Wednesday to create an international network of 16 labs to try new approaches to making a vaccine against AIDS.

The foundation says it wants the program to transform the so-far unsuccessful AIDS vaccine effort by rewarding individual labs that come up with innovative ideas and helping them develop those ideas, but also ensuring that they collaborate with other researchers, who under ordinary circumstances would often be considered rivals.

"This is the foundation's largest-ever investment in HIV vaccine development. In fact, it's our largest-ever package of grants for HIV and AIDS," Dr. Nicholas Hellmann, acting director of the Gates Foundation's HIV, TB, and Reproductive Health program, told reporters in a telephone briefing.

AIDS was first described in 1981 and the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS was found soon after -- but it has proven extremely difficult to find a way to make an effective vaccine.

The virus attacks the very immune cells that are usually stimulated by a vaccine, and mutates quickly to evade back-up immune responses. More than 30 vaccines are being tested in people now, but no scientists expect that any of them will prevent HIV infection in large numbers of people.

The best hope with current approaches is to perhaps delay infection, or make the infection less destructive, in some people.

"Progress has simply not been fast enough," Hellmann said.

OLD AND NEW APPROACHES

The 16 grants will go to more than 165 investigators in 19 countries, some of them top names in AIDS research and some less well-known.

-- Robin Weiss of University College London and colleagues will use $25.3 million to look for antibodies -- immune system proteins -- in humans and animals that might help stop HIV.

-- Timothy Zamb of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative and colleagues will spend $23.7 million to test various viruses to use as vectors, which carry a vaccine into the body.

-- Leo Stamatatos of the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute and colleagues won $19.4 million to come up with computer design techniques to create synthetic molecules to trigger antibodies against HIV.

-- Giuseppe Pantaleo of the Center Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois in Lausanne, Switzerland, will use $15.3 million to look at the possibility of turning viruses related to smallpox into AIDS vaccines, including the first-ever vaccine made from a virus in the 18th century and which was used to eradicate smallpox by 1979.

Others will examine ways to make vaccines more effective, while five labs will create central facilities to help the others share data and compare results.

The researchers will be free to patent and profit from any findings but must agree to make any resulting vaccine freely available to people in the developing world.

The AIDS virus infects close to 40 million people and 25 million people have died of AIDS since 1981. HIV kills 8,000 people a day, most in Africa and many of them women and children.

There is no cure, although drugs can help control the virus and can sometimes help prevent it from being passed along.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates has donated $900,000 to set up a training facility for health professionals working with AIDS in Africa's Great Lakes region.

On a low-profile visit to Rwanda on Sunday and Monday, Gates offered the funds to set up the Center for Training and Operation Research to serve five nations: Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi, Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

"Such support from well-wishers will go a long way in helping developing countries achieve much in the war against the scourge," Dr. Agnes Binagwaho, executive secretary of Rwanda's National Aids Commission, said late on Wednesday.

Sub-Saharan Africa remains the region hardest-hit by AIDS, with about 25 million people infected. Binagwaho told Reuters 3 percent of Rwanda's 8 million people had HIV.

The ultra-modern facility will be run from Kigali by international experts under the coordination of Rwanda's AIDS Treatment and Research Center, the official added.

Gates, the world's wealthiest man and a major international philanthropist, was in Africa on a holiday with his wife Melinda and children, Rwandan officials said.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced on Wednesday grants worth $287 million to create an international network of 16 labs to try new approaches for making a vaccine against AIDS.

Vietnam may soon get its first sex education website for people too scared to talk openly about reproductive health, a topic widely considered taboo in the communist country.

The website would feature information, images and a question-and-answer forum aiming to combat ignorance and gender stereotyping now driving up teenage abortion and HIV/AIDS rates, said the institute behind the plan.

"Both young people and married couples still lack a lot of information about sexual health issues in Vietnam," said Dr Khuat Thu Hong, deputy director of the private Institute for Social Development Studies in Hanoi, on Thursday.

"Compared to neighbouring countries like Thailand, Cambodia and Laos, our country is probably in a worse situation because we are more closed."

She said the institute hoped to launch the service by December, pending approval by the communist government, with the aim of encouraging safe sex.

"Our research has found many Vietnamese women do not dare to suggest condom use because it suggests a lack of trust rather than true love," she said.

"Vietnamese girls are traditionally supposed to be pure and naive and innocent, so many of them feel they can't talk about sexual issues because it suggests they are already experienced."

The question-and-answer forum would give people information not covered in school curricula, she said, but people with questions considered too raunchy would be referred to "other sources" or the institute's library.

Hong said the institute had informed both the Ministry of Culture and Information and the ruling Communist Party's Central Committee on Ideology and Culture of its plans and had received an initially positive response.

"We did talk with some of them about our intention and they welcomed it and said it is very useful," she said.