The United Nations called on governments on Friday to take immediate steps to better protect children from HIV/AIDS and ensure better treatment for those infected.

At the end of 2005, an estimated 30,000 children in East Asia and the Pacific were living with HIV or AIDS, nearly 11,000 of them newly infected, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) said in a statement at a conference in Hanoi.

"It is imperative that the call for action is taken seriously at the highest level of political decision making," Anupama Rao Singh, UNICEF's Regional Director of East Asia and the Pacific, said in the statement.

Asia has the world's fastest growing HIV rates, with 50 percent of all people infected in the region last year aged between 14 and 24.

UNICEF said about 450,000 children in the region had lost one or both parents to AIDS while millions more children and young people were at high risk of HIV infection or suffered from stigma and discrimination.

"To effectively mount our response, we need to improve our country-level analysis of the situation of children and the impact of HIV so as to be better able to guide efforts to plan and scale up our response," Singh added.

She also called for leaders of Southeast Asian nations to endorse a UNICEF plan to help children with HIV/AIDS at their next meeting in Manila.

Experts say the true extent of the region's epidemic is probably understated. The lack of good quality and consistent data on children and young people greatly hinders the region's response to the epidemic.

Of the 263,500 HIV/AIDS patients in Vietnam, 8,500 were under 19 years old, with only around 260 provided treatment on a regular basis last year, the Vietnamese government said in a report.

"Children are the hardest-affected victims of the HIV/AIDS epidemic," said Le Thi Thu, chairwoman of Vietnam's Commission of Population, Family and Children.

"These children should have the same rights as others," she told a news conference.

Only a few countries in the region collect data on children with HIV/AIDS, UNICEF said.

It also called for the elimination of religious and cultural taboos that deter parents and educators from addressing topics such as safe sex and condom use, and limited financial resources for prevention and adequate information.

Asia's most seriously affected countries are Thailand, Myanmar, Vietnam, Cambodia and India, with some five million of India's one billion population now believed to be HIV positive. China had about 800,000 with HIV, but the real figure could be much higher.

Some 9 million children in Africa have lost a mother to AIDS, British charity Save the Children said Monday, calling on donors to sharply increase aid to meet their needs.

"Incredibly, the impact of HIV and AIDS on children is still being ignored," Save the Children Chief Executive Jasmine Whitbread said in a statement.

The charity said in a report that a lack of testing facilities meant that many mothers, especially in the poorest countries, did not know their HIV status until they were ill and unable to fight off even the simplest infections.

"The AIDS pandemic robs millions of children of their childhoods as well as their mothers," Whitbread said. "Children are caring for their mothers, missing school, and having to work because their mothers are too sick to look after them."

The charity called for a focus on children orphaned by AIDS as well as sick parents, adding red tape was slowing aid flows.

"Donors must spend 12 percent of their AIDS funding on proper support for children," it said, adding this would amount to $6.4 billion over a three-year period.

In 2006, if Britain, the United States and Ireland met all their pledges, there would be $412 million committed for children -- or about one quarter of the $2.1 billion needed per year.

"This is best case scenario and it's not yet clear whether all of the donors will meet their commitments," a spokeswoman for Save the Children told Reuters by telephone from London.

The charity addressed its appeal to the G8 wealthy nations, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, the World Bank and the European Commission.

Sub-Saharan Africa has about 10 percent of the world's population but 60 percent of the people living with HIV/AIDS.

More than 3 million Africans were infected with HIV in 2005, representing 64 percent of all new infections globally and more than in any previous year for the impoverished continent, according to UNAIDS, the lead U.N. agency against AIDS.

Across sub-Saharan Africa, an estimated 4.6 percent of young women aged 15 to 24 are infected with HIV, compared to 1.7 percent of young men, according to U.N. data.

Save the Children said most of the 19.2 million women living with HIV around the globe were already mothers.

"To truly make a difference we must also support children whose mothers are HIV positive," it said.

"In sub-Saharan Africa alone, more than 12 million children under the age of 15 have lost one or both parents to AIDS. By 2010, at current rates of HIV infection, this number is likely to increase to 18 million," Save the Children said.

Ten-year-old Nguyen Thi Thuy isn't sure what HIV is or why she had to leave her uncle's family to live in a kindergarten with 22 other sick Vietnamese children.

"I don't know what kind of disease I have. Sometimes when I am ill, my whole body hurts," she said, pointing at her head, stomach and limbs.

Thuy, whose mother who died of AIDS four years ago, now lives in an orphanage inside a state-run rehabilitation centre for drug addicts, many of them HIV-positive, the Centre for Social Protection No. 2, some 80 kilometres (50 miles) southwest of the capital Hanoi.

Thuy is too young to know that death is probably near.

She appears healthy at first glance, as do the other children, aged five months to nine years, who are laughing and chasing each other across the centre's small, green playground.

"Caring for a child with HIV is probably ten times harder than caring for a healthy one," said Nguyen Thi Phuong, who runs the first such kindergarten in the Hanoi area.

"Love is not enough," she said. "We need volunteer mothers with good health and skills."

Phuong set up the centre on her own initiative in 2002. It now has 16 staff, 14 of them former drug users and carriers of the deadly virus.

What they bring in goodwill, they lack in resources. Vietnam's communist government gives just 270,000 dong (17 dollars) per month per child.

"We always need lots of drugs for the kids but unfortunately, we never have enough," Phuong said. "Ensuring nutrition for them is a major problem.

"We need a significant change in the way the medical system is handling children with HIV. We need many, many more skillful and trained doctors."

According to official statistics, Vietnam now has around 8,500 children under 15 living with HIV/AIDS.

No-one knows the true figure, but Vietnam is thought to have at least 300,000 HIV carriers, and experts warn that the disease is crossing from high-risk groups, such as intravenous drug users and prostitutes, into the general population.

In the largest metropolitan centre, Ho Chi Minh City, and the northern port of Haiphong, infections have crossed the red line of one per cent of the population, which at national level would signify an epidemic.

Foreign experts have lauded Hanoi's efforts to contain the disease, but resources remain scant in the developing country, where AIDS carries a heavy stigma and few sufferers have access to retroviral drugs.

As in many other Asian countries, children with HIV are largely ignored.

"Children living with HIV/AIDS in Vietnam do not receive good care," a ministry official told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.

"It is not because we don't pay attention to them. It's just because we don't have enough drugs, facilities and skills. There are not many government establishments for the kids, and demand is increasing day by day."

Since 2002, Phuong's kindergarten has received 42 orphans. Nine were adopted by families after they tested HIV negative after their first 18 months.

Ten others lie buried at a small cemetery nearby.

"We were not allowed to witness the last moments of any of our children," said volunteer Lam Uyen Nhi, 31. "We would not want to see it."

In the children's small playroom hangs a banner that reads, "Love them as if they were your children," and nearby stands a small altar.

"We just want to pray for them on their death anniversary, so that they can rest in peace," said Nhi, fighting tears.

"We were wrong to use drugs, and we got infected," she said. "We have to pay for our mistakes. But the kids here, they are innocent."

Five-year-old Unis Nyambura waves her yellow lollipop while waiting for treatment in a tuberculosis clinic in Nairobi's sprawling Kibera slum.

Wearing starred pajama bottoms under her green-and-white dress, she grimaces as she waits for an injection. Like many in Africa, Nyambura's TB status is complicated by an HIV infection.

"All the patients who've died here from TB were also infected with HIV," said Winfred Nzioka, a nurse at the African Medical and Research Foundation (AMREF) clinic in the Kenyan slum which is home to one million people.

Africa's TB crisis -- linked to HIV/AIDS, weak health systems and poverty -- is the main reason behind a rise in worldwide infection rates, the World Health Organization (WHO) said this week ahead of Friday's World Tuberculosis Day.

Of the two million people who die from TB every year, 1.5 million are Africans.

Nzioka said about two thirds of TB patients she treats have HIV. The virus attacks the immune system, leaving people far more susceptible to TB.

"Tuberculosis is coming in as an opportunistic infection," she said. "Our patients with TB/HIV normally deteriorate very fast."

AMREF estimates that more than two-thirds of people living with dual HIV/AIDS and TB infections are African.

Tuberculosis is caused by bacteria, which attack the lungs, but can also infect any part of the body. Left untreated, an infected person will pass it on to an estimated 10-15 people.

The disease is airborne, but sunlight and good ventilation can drastically decrease infection rates, health workers say.

BREEDING GROUND

At Kibera's AMREF clinic, the shelves are filled with rectangular medicine boxes labeled in black marker with patients' names.

Barring complications, treatment for TB is an eight-month ordeal. But not all follow through with the entire treatment and scientists warn that drug resistant TB is emerging as a global health problem.

"We are doing all we can to make sure drugs don't develop resistance," Joel Kangangi, head of the WHO's TB program in Kenya said, adding that surveys in the east African country showed resistance was very low.

The WHO says Kenya, which gives out free TB drugs, is making strides in the fight against TB.

But slums like Kibera, where the majority live in cramped and dire conditions, are at great risk of infection. "Poverty has really contributed to the TB spread," Nzioka said.

The canvas bags forming a roof above John Adava allow narrow shafts of light to pour into his small mud-wall house. Adava, who has TB and HIV, lives there with nine other people.

The day before World Tuberculosis Day, Adava said the free drugs from the clinic saved his life, pointing to a picture of his emaciated body nine months before he came to the clinic.

"Were it not for the drugs, we would not be able to celebrate this day alive," he said.

The number of women infected with HIV in Malaysia is on the rise, and housewives outnumber female sex workers four to one, the Malaysian AIDS Council said Wednesday.

In 1986, when the first AIDS cases were discovered in Malaysia, there were no female victims, but by 2004 women accounted for 7 percent of all HIV infections, the council said.

Of the 67,438 people found to be infected with HIV between 1996 and 2004, 4,841 were women. Of these, 1,756 were housewives and 435 were sex workers, said the council, Malaysia's main non-governmental group dealing with AIDS.

Housewives have been infected through their spouses, council President Dr. Adeeba Kamarulzaman said.

The council said it believes the actual number of infected women is higher because many do not come forward for tests and suffer the disease in silence.

Officials say some HIV patients are unwilling to seek treatment despite government subsidies for medication because they fear being ostracized.

HIV/AIDS was not reported in any females in Malaysia until 1988 when two women were infected, the council said. That number rose to 111 new cases in 1994, and to 842 new cases in 2004.

Overall, 7,575 men and women were diagnosed with HIV/AIDS in 2004 in Malaysia, a nation of 26 million, said the council, which regularly advises government health officials on policy.

The council data showed that 7,673 people have died of AIDS since 1986, including 582 women.