A 20-year-old man became the first volunteer to receive the vaccine Saturday, the Xinhua news agency said Sunday. He was followed by seven others.

Forty-nine volunteers aged 18-50 will undergo trials for the vaccine in the next year and longer, Xinhua said, citing Chen Jie, deputy director of the center for disease control and prevention in the southern province of Guangxi.

The trials will be conducted in three phases, Chen said, with the first lasting 14 months. The second phase will test the immune nature and safety of the vaccine.

China initially denied it had a serious problem with HIV/AIDS, but it has been under pressure to do more to prevent a major health crisis after a scandal over infections from unsanitary, state-approved bloodselling came to light.

The government has since stepped up efforts to battle the disease.

There have been about 35 AIDS vaccine trials on humans throughout the world, most of which are still in the first phase, according to Xinhua.

More than 20 million people worldwide have died of AIDS and some 38 million more have HIV, the virus which causes it.

But in the entire 23-year history of AIDS, only one vaccine, a design based on the gp120 protein, has ever gone through the entire three-phase test process, and it proved a disappointing flop.

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 rising to as many as 10 million by 2010.

Senior Minister of State for Health, Balaji Sadasivan, cited an unnamed medical expert's opinion that the Nation festival, which attracts thousands of revellers from around the region each August, is a possible cause for the rise.

"We do not know the reasons for the sharp increase of HIV in the gay community," Balaji said, as quoted by local radio station NewsRadio 93.8.

"An epidemiologist has suggested that this may be linked to the annual predominantly gay party in Sentosa, the Nation party, which allows gays from high prevalence societies to fraternise with local gay men, seeding the infection in the local community.

"However, this is an hypothesis and more research needs to be done by the experts."

Balaji told parliament that a record 311 people in Singapore had contracted HIV last year, 28 percent more than in 2003.

He said 90 percent of the people who contracted the virus last year were men, with a third of them gay.

There are now more than 2,000 HIV or AIDS confirmed patients in Singapore.

Fridae.com, which bills itself as Asia's largest website for gays, has hosted the increasingly popular Nation festival on the Sentosa resort island since 2001. More than 8,000 people attended last year's edition.

Fridae.com chief executive Stuart Koe reacted angrily to Balaji's comments. He said they would fuel homophobia in Singapore and he blamed inaction by the government as the main driver of the increase in HIV among gays.

"The government has failed to address the issue of MSMs (men having sex with men) in any of their public health campaigns," Koe told AFP, adding that the prohibition on homosexual acts in Singapore was also a major problem.

"Because gay sex is illegal, many of the public health agencies in Singapore aren't even available to work with MSM groups."

"These statements serve to fuel homophobia and discrimination in this country."

The government's hands-off approach to the Nation festival had helped build Singapore's reputation over recent years as one of Asia's premier gay tourism hubs, despite gay acts being illegal.

However, the government late last year signalled it was rethinking its stance on gay parties when it banned Fridae.com's planned all-night "Snowball.04" party that was scheduled to start on Christmas Day.

It cited incidents at the Nation parties for its banning of the Christmas event, which it said would be "against the moral values" of most Singaporeans.

Among measures to fight AIDS, Balaji said over-the-counter test kits that require only saliva samples may be made available, while the government was also considering making HIV testing for pregnant mothers compulsory.

The "Nation.04" party -- a festival of international DJs, podium dancers, pumping music and muscular boys stripping off their tops on packed dance floors -- had increased in size every year since it was launched in 2000.

Last August's party could have allowed "gays from high prevalence societies to fraternise with local gay men, seeding the infection in the local community," junior health minister Balaji Sadasivan told parliament on Wednesday.

Sadasivan said this was the view of an unnamed epidemiologist to explain a 28 percent rise in the number of new HIV/AIDS cases in Singapore in 2004 to an all-time high of 311.

"This is a hypothesis and more research needs to done," he said.

Gay activists such as Eileena Lee of "People Like Us" accused the government of promoting homophobia and being irresponsible. "This is almost like paranoia," she said. "Statements like this can marginalise and stigmatise what is already a minority group."

Fridae.com, which organised the event and runs Singapore's main gay and lesbian Internet site, said the government must shoulder more responsibility for the rise in HIV because of its poor public health policies and laws which criminalise oral sex.

Under Singapore's Penal Code section 377A, acts of "gross indecency" between two men are punishable by up to two years in jail. The government has said it may decriminalise oral sex but only between men and women.

"In the past 25 years none of the public health campaigns have ever targeted the gay community. It's really no wonder that the rates of infection are increasing," said Stuart Koe, chief executive of Fridae.com.

"It's very simplistic and dangerous of them to point the finger at one single event and say that that is responsible for the spike," he said.

Ninety percent of newly diagnosed patients were male and a third of them gay men, said Sadasivan, describing the new cases as "the tip of the iceberg" in Singapore where a total of about 2,000 people are diagnosed to be suffering from HIV/AIDS.

"For every AIDS patient we have diagnosed, there are possibly two to four undiagnosed patients with HIV in Singapore. That means there could be, anywhere between 4,000 to 8,000, undiagnosed HIV patients in Singapore," he said.

The "Nation.04" party -- half of whose 6,000 revellers came from other Asian countries and the United States to make it Asia's largest known gay festival -- is at odds with Singapore's image as a strait-laced city-state.

But the government has turned a blind eye to the growth of an entertainment industry catering for homosexuals, quietly acknowledging the potential of the "pink dollar."

Gay activists have urged authorities to decriminalise homosexuality in the affluent, predominantly ethnic Chinese island of 4.2 million people to strengthen AIDS awareness.

In an open letter to a UN drug meeting that opened in Vienna Monday, the Human Rights Watch group said the United Nations "under pressure from the United States, is being asked to withdraw support from proven HIV prevention strategies at precisely the moment when increased commitment to measures such as syringe exchange and opiate substition treatment is needed."

"The United States should be encouraging proven HIV prevention strategies, not attacking them," Human Rights Watch said in the letter, written in cooperation with 300 NGO's from 56 countries.

"In most countries outside Africa, the largest number of new infections now occurs among injection drug users," the letter said.

"We must not deny these addicts any genuine opportunities to remain HIV negative," Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) told in Vienna on Monday the 48th session of the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND).

Costa said that contaminated syringes were a major source of transmission of the HIV virus and other diseases including hepatitis, especially among drug users whose capacity for rational thought was diminished.

"We reject the false dichotomy that either drug control prevails, with no consideration for HIV, or that HIV prevention prevails with no consideration for drug abuse," he added.

John Walters, director of the US Office of National drug control policy disagreed, telling reporters at the commission session that the United States remained "concerned about the global danger of HIV/aids transmission."

"The single greatest way of preventing the spread of HIV/aids through drug users is taking those addicted and get them to recover," Walters said.

The United States thinks the UN body "should not be involved with needle exchange because this is promoting drug use," said an unnamed US government official.

But Walters said that the points of agreement in the fight against drug abuse outweighed the differences, saying "there has been a kind of caricature" of the two sides' positions.

But the influential US newspaper, the New York Times, pointed to stark differences of opinion when it said in an editorial last week that "Washington's antipathy toward needle exchanges is a triumph of ideology over science, logic and compassion."

The Times said such exchanges were "a proven weapons against AIDS transmission" and that the US government's blocking money for such programs as it does for abortion programs, "would be an even more deadly mistake."

Jane Francis, a spokeswoman for the Council of Senlis think tank said "forced abstinence does not work if the drug addicts are not ready to stop."

"Needle exchange is the biggest life saver," she said, adding that the idea that "AIDS is getting spread through drug users" was "totally ridiculous."

Costa had said in a letter sent in November to the US State Department that the controversy over US objections to needle exchanges "continue to place... (Costa's office) in a difficult position," according to a copy of the letter obtained by AFP.

Costa said the United Nations does not "endorse needle exchanges as a solution for drug abuse nor support public statements advocating such practices" and feels such "prophylactic measures to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS should be undertaken only within the overall effort to reduce druge abuse," the letter said.

"We already have the financing to carry out feasibility studies for this factory," Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorin said as he wrapped up a one-day visit to Mozambique late Wednesday.

"Health ministry officials will come to discuss the final details," said Amorin in remarks broadcast on television.

Some 12.2 percent of adults, or 1.3 million people, are living with HIV and AIDS in Mozambique, according to the UN AIDS agency.

No date has been set for the construction of the pharmaceutical plant to begin.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva visited Mozambique in 2003 and the then Mozambican president Joaquim Chissano paid a return visit to Brazil in August of last year.

Both countries are former Portuguese colonies.