"Of our 103 counties and cities, 51 of them have discovered cases of people being infected with HIV/AIDS (from tainted blood)," an official from the Hubei province health department told AFP by telephone.

"So far, we have found 1,301 cases of HIV/AIDS in Hubei."

In the 1990s more than 100,000 people sold blood in Hubei, the official said, but added that comprehensive studies had not been done to see how many people in the province were infected.

Hubei is located next to Henan province, believed to be the worst affected from a blood-selling scandal that is wreaking devastation in farming communities, where some villages have the world's worst infection rates.

Other than Henan, which has been the most widely publicized, little has been revealed about Hubei and other provinces, even as officials last week admitted most parts of China had been affected by the unsanitary blood selling schemes.

Hubei is sending government employees to 21 areas of the province with high rates of infection before the end of March to help tackle AIDS, the Hubei health official said.

"They will live there for one year. They will oversee the work of village doctors to detect cases at an early stage, treat patients and set up prevention work," the official said.

A similar scheme is underway in Henan.

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 people infected through blood sales is far higher.

"I walked into a village with a reporter. We heard loud wailing coming from one of the homes. When we arrived at the house, I saw a child clutching at the mother's leg. The mother had hung herself because she had AIDS and couldn't treat herself," she said recently.

"Thinking about that ... now still makes me want to cry."

That incident and other similar encounters in Gao's home province of Henan in central China convinced her to devote the past eight years of her life to exposing the plight of poor farmers who contracted HIV/AIDS from selling blood in unsanitary government-approved collection schemes.

Gao was among some of the first physicians to hear about "the mysterious disease" that was killing villagers in the mid-1990s.

Farmers had been selling blood since the mid-1980s and a decade later many had begun to die. Local hospitals turned them away, not knowing what the disease was.

Experts estimate at least one million farmers in Henan alone contracted HIV/AIDS in the blood trade, and while several other provinces have similar outbreaks, the Chinese government does not know or has not revealed the extent of the problem.

Despite being chased away by local officials hoping to cover up the outbreak, Gao repeatedly went back to villages, bringing food, clothes and money for the families.

Since 1996, Gao has spent 80,000 yuan (9,638 US dollars) of her own money to help 164 children orphaned by AIDS, and visited more than 100 villages.

She alone has seen more than 1,000 AIDS patients.

Her phone is constantly tapped, and she has been accused by local officials of disclosing her country's secrets to its overseas enemies -- foreign journalists.

And Henan officials recently followed her all the way to Beijing to try to scare her into not attending a speech by former US president Bill Clinton during an AIDS conference.

None of that has stopped Gao.

"I believe in life, people should do all they can to help others," Gao said. "I will do this until the day I die."

Gao is of the dwindling generation of people who became an adult before the Communist Party took over in 1949. Because of her parents' background as landlords, the former gynecologist was demoted and forced to clean hospital bathrooms for eight years during the Cultural Revolution.

"I went through a lot of hardship. That's why I help others. I feel sorry for them," Gao said.

Her efforts helped to eventually bring the AIDS scandal to the public.

Outside of China, Gao is perhaps the mainland's best known AIDS activist, having won a series of prestigious awards, including the Jonathan Mann Award.

But it was only last month that she won the first ever award in China, a "Touching China" award given by the China Central Television station to 10 people each year.

Partly as a result of her campaigning, the government now is beginning to give free AIDS drugs to some of the farmers affected by the blood-sale schemes, and even Vice Premier Wu Yi has taken time to meet with her.

Despite these initial victories, Gao decries the fact Henan officials involved in the unsafe blood trade have yet to be punished, but rather have been promoted.

Other provincial governments that collected blood haven't been exposed and officials continue to hamper efforts by the media and volunteers, Gao said.

"AIDS is not just a Henan problem. So many years this has been going on. It's so serious," Gao said recently. "But in many places AIDS outbreaks still haven't been reported. These places are still sealed up."

UNITED NATIONS (AFP) - Women are becoming the main victims of the global AIDS epidemic, Secretary General Kofi Annan said at a UN session to mark International Women's Day.

He told a gathering attended by Queen Noor of Jordan that girls and young women now account for nearly two-thirds of people worldwide below the age of 24 who are living with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

At least half of all new infections are women, which he said indicated a "terrifying pattern" that has changed the way the disease is cutting its way through communities across the globe.

"All over the world, women are increasingly bearing the brunt of the epidemic," Annan said. "If these rates of infection continue, women will soon become the majority of the global total of people infected."

He stressed that the strategy of trying to combat the illness through abstinence and the use of condoms was not "realistic" for many women, whom he said are suffering because of their inferior status in many societies.

He asked why women were more vulnerable to infection despite the fact that their male partners are more likely to be the ones engaged in at-risk behaviour.

"Usually because society's inequalities puts them at risk -- unjust, unconscionable and untenable risk," Annan said.

"There are many factors, including poverty, abuse and violence, lack of information, coercion by older men, and men having several partners," he said.

"Society pays, many times over, the deadly price of the impact on women of HIV/AIDS."

Queen Noor, the widow of King Hussein, told the session that despite relatively low numbers of people living with the disease in the Middle East -- an estimated 600,000 in the region -- more than half of those were women.

"They bear children but seldom control their own sexual lives," she said.

The head of the UN's Development Fund for Women, Noeleen Heyzer, told reporters that women were vulnerable to the disease for a number of reasons, including a lack of both money and education.

She said that in many societies, women were getting married at an increasingly early age to try to improve their economic situations -- and marrying increasingly older men, a point underlined by Annan.

"What is needed is real, positive change that will give more power and confidence to women and girls, and transform relations between women and men at all levels of society," the UN chief said.

He called for "change that will strengthen legal protection of women's property and inheritance rights ... (and) change that makes men assume responsibility."

BANGKOK (AFP) - HIV infection rates among Asian women are soaring and being married is one of the biggest risk factors as many women are contracting the disease from their husbands, the United Nations said.

UNAIDS deputy executive director Kathleen Cravero said women's infection rates in the region had jumped 10 percent in the past two years and would likely soon match that of men if governments failed to take action.

"Women make up 30 percent of adult infections in Southeast Asia and in some countries this is fast moving towards 50 percent," Cravero at an event held to mark International Women's Day.

"In Papua New Guinea more than half of all new infections are among women," she added.

Cravero said marriage had proven to be a high risk factor for women throughout Asia, with many husbands having several extra-marital partners and their wives powerless to object.

"In Thailand a full 40 percent of new infections occurs between spouses, with 90 percent of them from husband to wife, and we have seen a similar trend in other countries such as India," she said.

"One of the biggest factors for this in Asia is the culture of silence, in which women cannot ask about sex or the sexual behaviour of their partners."

Malinee Sukavejworakit, an advisor to the Thai Senate Committee on Public Health, said Thailand had made great strides in AIDS awareness but that cultural issues were an obstacle to educating women about the disease.

"We try to put condom machines in universities and public places but Asian culture is different, it is very difficult to persuade people to accept that condoms must be accessible, but this needs to be done," she said.

"Girls at school and the wife at home, who were once the lowest risk group, are now high risk because of the behaviour of their husbands and boyfriends," she told AFP.

In a statement to mark International Women's Day UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said HIV-AIDS was taking a devastating toll on women.

"In the world as a whole, at least half of those newly infected are women, and among people younger than 24, girls and young women now make up nearly two thirds of those living with HIV," he said.

"If these rates of infection continue, women will soon become the majority of the global total of people infected."

Annan said factors such as poverty, abuse and a lack of education were making many current prevention strategies ineffective.

"Where sexual violence violence is widespread, abstinence or insisting on condom use is not a realistic option for women and girls."

Cravero said there were fears that the epidemic in Asia could develop into a situation similar to sub-Saharan Africa, where of the 29.4 million people with HIV-AIDS some 58 percent are female.

One possibility being explored is that women may be clinically more vulnerable to HIV than men, but another factor is that they face a high threat of rape by acquantainces or coercive sex with infected husbands.

One in every five HIV infections worldwide occurs in the Asia Pacific region according to the United Nations.

It estimates over eight million people in the region had been infected with the virus by the end of 2002, of which more than two and a half million were between the ages of 15 to 24.

According to Daniela Bagozzi, spokeswoman for the World Health Organization in Geneva, "nothing much has changed since August," when a compromise between the 146 members of the World Trade Organisation broke an eight-month deadlock over the changes.

"From what we know and what we've heard, no country has issued a demand for a compulsory licence as authorized within the agreement," she said.

An official of the UN joint programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), who asked not to be quoted by name, said the complexity of the WTO agreement was partly to blame for discouraging potential beneficiary countries.

But he also accused the United States of "protecting its pharmaceutical industry by putting pressure of various kinds on small countries such as Morocco and those in Central America not to take advantage of the agreement."

International drug companies have been on the defensive since 2001, when 39 firms buckled in the face of worldwide outrage and abandoned a lawsuit against the South African government for importing generic versions of patented antiretroviral drugs.

A spokesman for the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA) suggested that the industry's defensiveness was misplaced.

"Ninety-five percent of the 305 drugs classified as essential by the WTO are no longer protected by patent and can be freely copied," he said. "Whether there is a WTO agreement or not, the poor countries have no money and usually have no hospitals, doctors, dispensaries or drinking water."

An executive of a European drug company added: "We are the ideal scapegoat, the excuse for governments not to pay for health care."

Whoever is to blame, in the opinion of Oxfam International, the poor countries' failure to use their new-found rights plays into the hands of the drug firms.

"The pharmaceuticals don't suffer from the current situation," said Jennifer Bryant, Oxfam's spokeswoman in Geneva. "That's why we want the WTO agreement to be rewritten," she added, because "only competition with generic producers can lead to a significant fall" in drug prices.

Bagozzi, referring respectively to the lawsuit and to the current round of WTO talks, said:

"Something has changed in the atmosphere since Pretoria and Doha. WHO and UNAIDS are moving forward to make it better, but the pharmaceuticals did not move much."

The EFPIA insisted, however, that "our attitude has changed" and said the firms were making costly drugs available in poor countries through private-public partnerships.

There is evidence that the various programmes had brought down the price and improved the quality of life-saving drugs in countries such as Cameroon, Chad, Gabon, Kenya and Rwanda.

Progress remains very limited, however, when compared to the terrible fact that 14,000 people are infected with HIV every day in Africa and that a child dies of malaria every 30 seconds.

CAPE TOWN (AFP) - South Africa's leading AIDS lobby group promised to launch court action against the government within two weeks if a programme aimed at treating five million who are infected with the virus was not speeded up.

Zackie Achmat, leader of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), told about 2,000 members of the group in Cape Town that the government had been slow in implementing a treatment plan which provides for the provision of potentially life-saving anti-retroviral drugs (ARVs) for those infected with HIV and AIDS.

"We are ready to go to court within two weeks if necessary," he said, receiving loud cheers from the crowd.

"But we are prepared to talk. Bring us the medicines and we can work together."

The UN's AIDS agency estimates that South Africa had 5.3 million people infected with HIV and AIDS at the end of 2002 -- the highest number in the world.

Achmat, who along with the TAC, has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for lobbying the South African government to supply free antiretrovirals, has regulalry been at loggerheads with the state over the provision of a treatment programme for the disease.

In mid-November, South Africa's cabinet approved the outline of a plan to provide ARVs for those infected with HIV/AIDS, after several court battles between government and AIDS lobby groups.

The TAC said in January only one of South Africa's nine provinces -- the Western Cape -- has started with treatment at some 13 sites, and while others seemed to gearing up, it was the only concrete action taken so far in the fight against the disease.

Some 16 million people in Latin America and the Caribbean are affected with HIV/AIDS and the disease is spreading, but the number of people who have access to anti-AIDS drugs is "negligible," WHO director-general Lee Jong-wook told a news conference.

"Latin America must do more because HIV/AIDS is a growing problem worldwide," said Lee, who is in Peru to promote a plan to provide anti-AIDS drugs to 3 million people in developing countries by the end of 2005.

"Antiretroviral drugs can keep people alive and keep people productive. ... In Latin America the number of people with access to those drugs is negligible -- almost none," he added.

Lee's statements echoed a recent World Bank study that said Latin America had the infrastructure to deal with AIDS but that it needed to quicken its response because the disease was becoming more generalized, affecting not just high risk groups such as gay men and intravenous drug users.

Health ministers of 10 Latin American nations last June signed a landmark agreement with pharmaceutical companies to fix a maximum price for anti-AIDS drugs because some countries were paying up to 10 times more for the same drug.

But Lee said the drugs were not always getting through to those who needed them most and that more government testing was necessary to identify people requiring treatment.

Not everyone with AIDS can be helped by antiretroviral drugs, he said.

"One area is pregnant woman, because antiretroviral drugs can prevent expectant mothers with AIDS from passing the disease on to her newborn child," Lee said. "Some woman may be unaware they have the disease," he added.

Lee singled out Brazil as a model for Latin America because of the government's free HIV testing program. The project aims to find hundreds of thousands of people who are unaware they have the virus and has a goal of 3.6 million tests by the end of this year.

Around 40 million people worldwide are infected with HIV, and the pandemic killed 3 million people in 2003, the WHO said.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The artist who made his name taking pictures of hundreds of nude people in public around the world has taken up a new cause.

Spencer Tunick, who once battled former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani for the right to photograph a crowd of naked people in Times Square, photographed nearly 100 HIV)-positive people posing in a French bistro in New York's meatpacking district on Saturday.

At the bistro, black and white men and women of all shapes and sizes -- and all nude -- draped across restaurant counters, benches and across the floor in an event marking the tenth anniversary of POZ magazine for people with AIDS and HIV.

One of the subjects was Shawn Decker, a 28-year-old from Charlottesville, Virginia who contracted HIV at age 11 from a blood product he used as a hemophiliac.

Decker, who was expelled from school in sixth grade because of his HIV status, said the setting was "like a camaraderie because everyone has dealt with the same fears about mortality."

The New York-based Tunick, 37, said his latest work "brings up art issues and social issues," and seeks to make the viewer think about the vulnerability and resilience of people who are HIV positive.

POZ Magazine editor-in-chief Walter Armstrong said he hoped photographs from the event would "send a message to everyone who is afraid of HIV to let them know that they are just like everyone else."