The initiative is part of the Global AIDS Program, which is currently focusing on 25 countries including China.

It targets 10 provinces, including central China's Henan which has been hit by a major AIDS outbreak from farmers selling blood in unsafe government-run schemes.

In the next five years, the US CDC's China office and China's CDC will work together to use the funding to prevent HIV infections, and improve treatment, care and support.

One goal is to help China address the key problem of not knowing how many cases of HIV/AIDS there are in the country and finding the people who are infected but are not aware they have the disease.

The government estimates there are 840,000 people infected with HIV/AIDS, but international experts believe the total number of infections is much higher and have warned there could be 10 million cases by 2010.

Many officials have no idea how many cases exist in their areas and those that do are reluctant to reveal them for fear of the economic consequences.

"Even though China's overall numbers is less than that of the United States ... based on our estimate, only 10 percent of the patients in China know they are infected," Ray Yip, director for the US CDC in China said at a launch ceremony Tuesday.

"That means 90 percent of China's HIV/AIDS patients don't know they have HIV/AIDS and each day that they don't know, they can infect others."

In contrast, about 70 percent of those infected in the United States know they have the disease.

Yip said a crucial task for China was finding the people infected so that they do not transmit the disease.

"I've heard from several provinces. They didn't think they had a problem. Once they tested people, they found 30 percent infection rates in some areas and they were shocked," Yip said.

Results from HIV testing are sometimes kept for official use and individuals are not informed, according to a CDC statement. Without sufficient anti-retroviral treatments, local officials are reluctant to test people or inform them for fear they would demand free treatment.

Intense fear and discrimination among the public and health workers also hampers efforts to test and care for patients, it said.

While China's top leadership has shown greater attention to AIDS in the past year, more commitment is needed, the CDC said.

"China can still prevent HIV/AIDS from reaching catastrophic proportions," US Ambassador Clark Randt told the ceremony's audience of mainly Chinese health officials.

"However, an HIV/AIDS catastrophie can only be avoided if China responds now urgently and forcefully with sufficient resources to stem this deadly tide."

Other provinces targeted in the program are: Anhui, Guizhou, Xinjiang, Heilongjiang, Inner Mongolia, Tibet, Guangdong, Shanghai and Beijing.

A Guangdong health official said he hoped the funding will help the province raise public awareness about AIDS.

"Publicity is a problem. We've requested TV stations do more public service announcements, but we can't pay them for it, so they don't," said the official who declined to be named.

Without support and awareness, high risk behaviors continue.

"We have 200,000 drug addicts in Guangdong, 15 percent of whom are women. But out of that 15 percent, 80 percent have multiple sex partners," he said.

BEIJING (AFP) - Most provinces in China could be affected by HIV/AIDS outbreaks from unsanitary blood sales, officials say, highlighting that Beijing does not know the extent of the epidemic it is grappling with.

Chinese and US officials said most areas of China likely have farmers infected with HIV/AIDS from selling blood in government-backed schemes which operated until the mid-1990s when they were banned.

"Every province in China has this problem from blood sales," a health official from China's northernmost Heilongjiang province told AFP at a gathering to launch a US-China joint AIDS prevention program Tuesday.

China's Ministry of Health had previously said the scandal affected mainly central China, particularly Henan and Anhui provinces.

Another Heilongjiang official told AFP two farmers in the province recently died from AIDS after selling blood for years.

"It's definitely not only two people," said Wu Yuhua, deputy director of the Heilongjiang Center for Disease Control and Prevention's Viral Disease Prevention Research Institute.

"We don't know how many others have AIDS from selling blood. We haven't done a study."

Wu said blood collecting was something practically the whole country was involved in because plasma was needed to make blood products.

"Now we're at a peak period. It takes eight to 10 years for the symptoms to show. People are dying now," Wu said. "In the whole country, this will be a problem."

A Ministry of Health official at the launching ceremony admitted the central government simply did not know how widespread infections were.

"We can't say other provinces definitely do not have infections from blood sales," said Qi Xiaoqiu, director general of the ministry's department of disease control.

"All we can say is there are some places where it's rather clear that they don't have such cases, such as Tibet and Beijing. But as for the other areas, basically, we're not really clear."

Ray Yip, director of the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention which is running a US-China AIDS program, said AIDS from blood selling was likely concentrated in central China, but most provinces in China have been affected.

"They might not have the same level like in Henan (province), but most provinces have some," Yip said.

Farmers who travelled from one part of the country to another to sell blood became infected and spread the disease, Yip said.

"I have known people for example in (southwestern China's) Guizhou province, who were organized by people to take them by train to go to Henan to sell blood for two weeks and they sell every day," Yip said.

He said no one, including the Chinese government, knew how many people contracted HIV through this method, and stressed the need to find HIV carriers to help them stay alive longer and prevent further transmissions.

"Heilongjiang right now can only find maybe two dozen cases... But the question is, do they actually have dozens of cases they don't know about?" Yip said.

China claims 20 percent of its estimated 840,000 HIV/AIDS patients got the disease from selling plasma, but international experts believe the total number of cases and number of people infected through blood sales is far higher.

By NICOLE ITANO, Associated Press Writer

MOHALES HOEK, Lesotho - Britain's Prince Harry, seeking attention Wednesday for parentless children with AIDS, planted a peach tree at an orphanage in this HIV-stricken nation.

Holding the hand of a 4-year-old orphan named Mutsu Potsane, the prince walked to a flower bed at the Mants'ase Children's Home where he planted the fruit tree. Mutsu helped the prince fill the hole. The orphanage is 60 miles south of the capital, Maseru.

The 19-year-old prince said his trip to Africa had been "fantastic" so far, adding he hoped his presence would bring recognition to the problems of this tiny mountain kingdom.

"Lesotho is not a country that is well-known, but it needs all the help it can get," Harry said.

The previous night, Harry attended a barbecue with the home's 25 residents. Some of whom have lost parents to AIDS.

"He's too nice," said 13-year-old Khotso Senoko, grinning. "We played with a ball."

Lesotho's Prince Seeiso, the younger brother of King Letsie III, helped organize Harry's visit.

"He's getting a feel of the extent of the problem," said Seeiso, adding that Harry has been "taken aback" by some of what he has seen.

He has also visited AIDS patients with a local doctor, seeing firsthand the effects of the pandemic estimated to have infected 31 percent of Lesotho's 2 million people.

LIVINGSTONE, Zambia (AFP) - UNESCO Director General Koichiro Matsuura sounded an alarm on the increase of AIDS in South Asia, saying it was rising "very rapidly" there.

He was speaking in Livingstone, Zambia, on the eve of a conference on the pandemic in the Victoria Falls resort between UN agencies and southern African ministers.

As in Africa, Matsuura said, AIDS in South Asia was spreading primarily through "heterogeneous sex" between men and women, but South Asia had the advantage of stronger infrastructure in health services and education.

"In South Asia," he told AFP in an interview, "the trend is upward -- it is rising very rapidly.

"Some countries want to hide its extent," he said, but some South Asian leaders, such as those in Thailand, were making a concerted effort to stop the disease spreading.

In China, he added, there was a "new trend," with its leaders giving more priority to fighting AIDS.

"We have to protect young people," he said. "Education is crucial.

"The more education children have, the less likely they are to catch AIDS. We propose sex education for girls in particular."

The meeting in Livingstone, a regular six-monthly get-together of agencies involved in the UN AIDS body UNAIDS, which UNESCO is currently chairing, is usually held in New York or Europe, but switched this time at Zambia's invitation to focus on the "epicentre" of the disease in southern Africa.

At the end of 2003, the UN estimates, 26.6 million people in countries south of the Sahara desert were HIV-positive out of a world total of 65 million.

The Livingstone meeting on Thursday will see the UN agency heads meeting the ministers of health, finance and education from Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

South Africa was invited, Matsuura said, but the government responded that its ministers were "not available".

He singled out Brazil, Cambodia, Cuba, Senegal, Thailand and Uganda as countries which had made significant efforts to fight AIDS.

"National governments must play a key role," he said. "First we must raise the awareness of political leaders."

In Livingstone, Matsuura visited a school which includes AIDS orphans.

In January, he said, he visited Ghana with his wife Takako, and an AIDS victim there died holding his wife's hand -- "that was very shocking".

Livingstone, on the border with Zimbabwe, is a hot-spot for AIDS, as are most frontier towns in Africa, with cheap prostitutes servicing long-distance truck drivers who spread the disease everywhere they go.

Some 25 to 30 percent of Zambian adults are HIV-positive, according to UN estimates, with the rate in Livingstone at the high end.

The Lusaka government is just starting to provide antiretroviral drugs to sufferers. Most will have to pay, but the government says it will provide free drugs for the poorest 20 percent.

LIVINGSTONE, Zambia (AFP) - A new momentum has appeared to provide funding for the fight against AIDS and cheap treatment for its victims around the world, but "we are falling behind," heads of UN agencies said.

Peter Piot, the executive director of UNAIDS, declared at a meeting in Zambia with ministers of health, education and finance from six southern African countries that "we are definitely in the middle of a political momentum around the world" to step up the campaign.

That included "momentum of hope" generated by cheap access to antiretroviral drugs and "financial momentum" resulting from money being supplied by major donors, he told the conference in the resort town of Livingstone, on the Victoria Falls.

The challenge, now, he said, was "how can we make this money work?"

UNESCO Director General Koichiro Matsuura said the aim of the meeting was "to find better ways of working together".

But he warned: "Whatever else it may be, AIDS is a development disaster. AIDS is wiping out decades of investment in education and human development."

"Unfortunately, we have to recognise that we are falling behind," Matsuura said.

"Since there is no vaccine and no cure, and scaled-up treatments are only now becoming available, prevention remains vital if the spread of the epidemic is to be curtailed. But we have not been able to address the issue of prevention in a way that takes hold."

Matsuura said the problems of AIDS were long-standing, "but there is now a new urgency".

Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa, who opened the meeting between the UN chiefs from six agencies and the ministers of health, education and finance from Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe, said his government was committed to providing "all the political will that is necessary".

But he pointed out that 70 percent of people in southern Africa live below the poverty line, making it difficult for governments to raise funds to fight the disease, which has hit southern Africa harder than anywhere else in the world.

At the end of 2003, the UN estimates, 26.6 million people in countries south of the Sahara desert were HIV-positive out of a world total of 65 million.

That includes prevalence rates approaching 40 percent of adults in some countries and 60 percent in those countries' worst-hit regions.

"The epidemic (in southern and eastern Africa) has reached a stage where death is visibly and viscerally felt," said a background paper prepared for the conference.

"We stand at a critical crossroads with a devastating triple-threat of HIV/AIDS, weakened capacity for governance, and hunger on the one hand, and an enormous opportunity to channel national, regional and international resources and capacity to reverse the epidemic on the other."

It said the epdemic was "hollowing out" governments' capacity to deliver services, with vacancies in the civil service at critical levels.

Another background paper warned that "top-down" education would not work, saying: "there is probably no issue that depends as much on being embedded in the cultural realities of place and community as teaching and learning about HIV/AIDS."

CHICAGO - A jury ordered the mother of a man who died of AIDS to pay her son's former fiancee $2 million because she did not tell the woman about her son's condition.

The former fiancee sued Albert Dilling's parents, claiming Dilling infected her with HIV through unprotected sex because he and his parents did not inform her of his condition. The woman was identified in court papers only as "Jane Doe."

Attorneys for Elizabeth Dilling, Albert's mother, argued she would have broken the state's AIDS confidentiality law had she revealed her son's condition.

Phone calls to Dilling's attorney, Peter Bustamante, on Wednesday were not immediately returned, but supporters of Illinois' AIDS confidentiality law said they hope an appeals court throws out Tuesday's verdict.

"It would have been a violation of Illinois law for these parents to tell this woman of their son's HIV status," said Ann Hilton Fisher, executive director of the AIDS Legal Counsel of Chicago.

The ex-fiancee sued Dilling's parents, Elizabeth and Kirkpatrick Dilling. Kirkpatrick died in 2003.

The woman claims she became infected through unprotected sex with Albert Dilling in 1996 and did not know he had AIDS until a month before he died in 1999. She said he and his parents lied to her about his condition.

"Our claim wasn't that Albert's parents had any duty to volunteer information about their son's medical care," the woman's attorney, Hall Adams III, said Wednesday. "But when they took it upon themselves to offer information about their son's condition, they had an obligation to give accurate information."

The woman said she could have received anti-retroviral medicine to help prevent the HIV infection from developing into full-blown AIDS had she known about her fiancee's condition.

India, which makes the world's cheapest AIDS drugs, has the second largest number of HIV/AIDS patients in the world with 4.58 million people afflicted with the virus, compared with five million in South Africa.

Indian companies announced last year they would slash costs for AIDS drugs to 38 cents a day for the developing world for the triple-drug regimen needed to treat the illness.

Ayanda Ntsaluba, director general of South Africa's foreign trade, said his nation was looking to India for "practical solutions" to tackle AIDS.

Ntsaluba is attending a two-day trilateral joint commission meeting of India, Brazil and South Africa in the Indian capital.

"There are current discussions between Indian companies and South African drugmakers who are even looking at sourcing pharmaceutical materials from India," he said on the meeting sidelines.

"We've encouraged private pharmaceutical companies in India and South Africa not to restrict themselves only to AIDS drugs although that's the main focus."

He said South African Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang was meeting her Indian counterpart, Sushma Swaraj, to follow up on business-to-business partnerships.

The meetings are aimed at cutting the prices of anti-retroviral AIDS drugs available in South Africa.

Last year, former US president Bill Clinton worked with three Indian pharmaceutical companies to slash the costs of AIDS drugs to 38 cents a day for the developing world.

New Delhi later announced its own plan to try to cut prices even lower for Indian patients to less than 20 cents a day from 38 cents in India.

India's health minister said her government was negotiating with Indian drug companies to get "the world's cheapest drugs" for Indian AIDS patients by next month.

NEW DELHI (AFP) - With 4.58 million people living with HIV/AIDS, second only to South Africa with five million, India is a fit case for US President George W. Bush's "emergency plan" for AIDS relief, a Washington-based private think tank said.

"India does not have the prevalence rates that have devastated some African countries but it has an epidemic that already affects the general population and that could explode with little notice," said a report published by the US Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

"This is the moment of strategic opportunity for India. If AIDS goes out of control, there will be an impact both on the domestic and international fronts," said Teresita C. Schaffer, CSIS South Asia director, while releasing the study in New Delhi.

"The strongest way to signal real engagement is to make India eligible for funding under the President's Emergency Plan," Schaffer said.

In January, Bush unveiled a plan to "meet a severe and urgent crisis abroad, for AIDS Relief", pledging 15 billion dollars over five years to meet the crisis.

Fourteen countries have since been included in the plan, mostly from Africa, while the US Congress has mandated the addition of a 15th country, which the report said should be India.

VIENNA (AFP) - Afghanistan's cultivation of opium poppies continues to rise, fuelling not only heroin abuse but also the rapid spread of AIDS and HIV, the UN agency on drugs said in its annual report.

The International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) said it had noted increased levels of heroin abuse in South Africa, China and former Soviet countries which all had high HIV infection rates.

The agency expressed "particular concern" for increased intravenous drug use around the South African cities of Johannesburg, Pretoria and Cape Town.

"Heroin is being smuggled into South Africa, where its abuse has increased, particularly among the youth," its report said. "That trend is worrisome as the HIV/AIDS prevalence rate is very high in South Africa."

South Africa has the world's highest number of HIV-infected cases -- 5.3 million people, according to UN figures for 2002. HIV is the virus that causes AIDS.

Afghanistan increased its production in 2003 to an estimated 3,600 tonnes of opium, up from 3,400 tonnes the previous year, when it reclaimed its position as the world's biggest producer of the drug after the fall of the Taliban.

The report said poppies were now being grown over 80,000 hectares (200,000 acres) of land in 28 of the country's 32 provinces -- including many new fields recently reconverted to what has become the war-torn country's biggest source of jobs and money.

"The board noted with concern that the limited progress in reconstruction over the past 18 months been accompanied by various illicit activities, including drug production and trafficking, which have become two of the main sources of income and employment in Afghanistan," the UN agency report said.

INCB secretary Herbert Schaepe said the board was worried that the increase in opium production in Afghanistan and its greater availability would spawn more heroin abuse along trade routes and in Europe.

In neighbouring Pakistan, HIV infection has gone up among intravenous drug addicts in the past year, the report said.

Schaepe told journalists at a press briefing in Vienna that abuse of opiate derivates, which include heroin, had "increased sharply in the last few years, especially in the countries that formed part of the former Soviet Union."

"This is worrying not only because of the opiate abuse itself but because the drug is injected it is contributing to the very quick spread of HIV in these countries."

One of the members of the board, Rainer Schmid, said heroin abuse was dropping in Western countries where strong prevention measures had been put in place -- such as the Netherlands -- but it had risen sharply in states along the drugs trade routes.

"Central Asia has developed dramatically from a transit country into a negative situation," he said.

The report said drug addiction had always been prevalent in opium-producing countries, but that because many users had now turned to heroin, which is injected, there was now the added risk of HIV infection.

"The abuse of drugs, primarily heroin, by injection has been a major factor contributing to the spread of HIV/AIDS in southeast Asian countries and in China. The number of registered addicts in China is increasing," it said.

The INCB said the profits of the opium trade "corrupt institutions, finance terrorism and insurgency and lead to a destabilisation of the region."

It urged the Afghan Transitional Authority to implement a national drug law drafted with the help of the United Nations and called on donor nations to increase their funding to the government to help it combat the drug trade.

Opium production has long fuelled the turmoil in Afghanistan and reached its peak in 1999 and 2000, when output respectively reached 4,600 and 3,300 tonnes.

In 2001 it dropped to 185 tonnes after the Taliban banned the growing of opium poppies.

The UN estimates that the country's stockpile of heroin is so big that it could supply the market with that alone for several years.