BEIJING (Reuters) - China warned Sunday that AIDS was spreading rapidly in the country and ordered urgent measures including school education and public awareness campaigns to help keep the deadly virus in check.

The State Council, or cabinet, in a 12-page circular to all levels of government, also said local officials would be judged by their efforts in prevention and control.

"Those officials breaching duty or hiding epidemic reports will be severely punished," Xinhua quoted the circular as saying.

The cabinet circular was the latest move in a government efforts to curb the disease that picked up last year, after years of ignoring or hiding a growing epidemic.

China has faced international condemnation for disguising the scale of its AIDS epidemic, neglecting patients and arresting activists and journalists.

But last year, Premier Wen Jiabao became the first top Chinese leader to shake hands with an AIDS patient and the government sent health workers to the central province of Henan where villages were ravaged by botched blood selling schemes in the 1990s.

China, alongside India and Russia, is one of the countries most at risk from AIDS outside Africa and health agencies say it could have 10 million victims by 2010 if it fails to take the threat seriously.

Railway, aviation and other public transportation departments were ordered to publicize AIDS prevention to passengers, and entertainment venues were required to post or distribute education materials to customers.

Medical workers were required to advise patients on AIDS prevention and condom use, and pregnant women would get free prevention services to reduce the possibility of mother to infant transmission.

"Research and production of new anti-AIDS medicines will be stepped up as the government will inject more funds in AIDS prevention and treatment," Xinhua quoted the circular as saying.

State media at the weekend also published a speech by Vice Premier Wu Yi from April in which she warned the epidemic may spread from high-risk groups to the mainstream and that "the consequences will be very grave" if China fails to act.

"The epidemic situation of AIDS in China is still severe at present," Wu said. "Prevention work is at a crucial stage."

Official figures show China has 840,000 infected with HIV, of which 80,000 suffer from AIDS. Activists estimate the extent of the outbreak is far higher, saying more than one million are probably infected in Henan alone.

© Reuters 2004. All Rights Reserved.

BENGHAZI, Libya (AFP) - Libyans whose young relatives were infected with HIV/AIDS at a children's hospital lashed at US criticism of death sentences for five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor.

About 1,000 people, mostly relatives of the victims, marched through the streets of this northern city, many carrying pictures of the infected children.

Some also carried placards, including ones saying "The blood of our children is not water," and "Our justice is fair and above all suspicion."

They then made their way to the Italian consulate, which represents US interests in the country, and held up images of Iraqi prisoners being abused by US soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad and burned a US flag.

Below the Iraqi images was written: "Where are the human rights?" -- echoing official criticism Washington cannot lecture others on rights amid the scandal.

The US State Department has called the Libyan court sentences "unacceptable" and said the legal and human rights of the accused had been violated numerous times since the allegations were first made five years ago.

A Benghazi court on Thursday sentenced the five medical staff to death by firing squad on charges of deliberately infecting more than 400 children by injecting them with tainted blood products. Forty-three of the children have since died.

They were also ordered to pay one million dollars (827,000 euros) to compensate the families.

All the defendants had pleaded not guilty and they have the right to appeal.

Two of the Bulgarian nurses and the Palestinian doctor said during the trial they were tortured into making the confessions.

Their lawyers also said their clients are being used as scapegoats for inadequate sterilization of instruments at the pediatric hospital before the medical workers arrived in 1998.

The verdicts were seen as crucial for the international standing of Libya, which has been moving to rejoin the world community since it agreed in December to disarm its weapons of mass destruction programmes.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The United States denounced as "unacceptable" the convictions and death sentences handed down by a Libyan court against five Bulgarian medical workers and a Palestinian doctor who had been accused of intentionally spreading the AIDS virus.

The State Department said legal and the human rights of the accused had been violated numerous times since the allegations were first made five years ago and vowed to continue to raise the matter with Libyan officials.

"We have been following this every closely for five years," spokesman Richard Boucher said. "We have been very critical of Libyan violations of the legal and human rights of the Bulgarian medics. We find the verdict that was pronounced in the court to be unacceptable."

Earlier Thursday, the court in Benghazi convicted the five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor over the death from AIDS of children in a hospital there and sentenced them to death. A Bulgarian doctor was jailed for four years in a separate case.

Boucher said the United States sympathized with the families of the more than 400 children who were infected with HIV, of whom 43 have since died, but that the accused, who have a right to appeal the verdicts, should be released and allowed to return home.

"We recognize the great human tragedy that occured in Banghazi and our deepest sympathy is extended to the families of the 400 hundred children who were infected with the HIV/AIDS virus," he told reporters.

Boucher said the US diplomats attached to the newly opened US interests section in Tripoli had attended the trial and would be following up on the matter with Libyan officials.

"We urge the government of Libya to take steps to resolve this case quickly," he said.

Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi had said in 2001 that the case might involve a US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or Israeli Mossad plot to experiment with the virus.

But the lawyers for the defendants have said their clients are being used as scapegoats for inadequate sterilization of instruments at the pediatric hospital in Benghazi before the Bulgarians and the Palestinian arrived in 1998.

All pleaded not guilty to the charges when the trial opened four years ago and the verdicts have been postponed several times while Bulgaria and the European Union have demanded that the suspects be released and allowed to go home.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Wednesday after meeting with visiting Bulgarian Foreign Minister Solomon Passy that Washington had been pressing and would continue to call on Libya to release the seven health workers.

Neither Boucher nor Powell could say whether the court verdict would affect the dramatic rapprochement between the United States and Libya which has come about since Tripoli renounced weapons of mass destruction in December.

PHNOM PENH (AFP) - A multi-million dollar mass-media campaign including television dramas and radio shows aimed at fighting HIV-AIDS in Cambodia was launched.

The 25-month BBC World Service Trust campaign is also using radio and TV commercials and radio phone-in programmes to highlight issues surrounding the spread of HIV in the kingdom as well as maternal and child health.

"We hope to have a huge impact on knowledge, attitudes and behaviours in regard to HIV-AIDS right across Cambodia," Giselle Portenier, head of the project, told reporters.

The TV and radio broadcasts will be transmitted in 21 of Cambodia's 24 provinces, covering more than 90 percent of the population, she added.

Cambodia's secretary of state for the ministry of health Mam Bun Heng said the launch was a landmark event for public health in the kingdom.

"Today our aims are being written across the sky, carried on the airwaves of Cambodia's leading broadcasters," he said.

Cambodia has the highest adult HIV prevalence rate in Asia. Figures for 2002 show that 2.7 percent of adult Cambodians are infected with the HIV virus.

AIDS has claimed 80,000 lives here and at the current rate the government expects the death toll to reach 230,000 by 2010.

BEIJING, (AFP) - The Chinese province worst-hit by HIV /AIDS is turning to traditional Chinese medicine because Western-style drugs proved to have too many side-effects and were too expensive, state media reports.

Central Henan province, which has at least 35,000 HIV/AIDS patients, will kick off a campaign next month to promote traditional medicines as a way to fight the disease, the China Daily said.

Efforts will be targeted mainly at the area's vast countryside, where most of Henan's HIV/AIDS carriers live.

The decision to use traditional medicine comes 10 months after China launched a program to provide free anti-retroviral drugs to thousands of AIDS-stricken farmers.

Health officials have since admitted the drugs are old, less effective versions, and around 20 percent of patients have stopped taking them because of severe side-effects.

Newer drugs are too expensive.

While patent expiration for major AIDS-treatment medicines has lowered the annual treatment costs for an AIDS patient in China to less than 20,000 yuan (2,415 dollars), it is still far beyond the means of the average Chinese.

The report said the new scheme would be launched at selected hospitals in the province. Teams will also be established to explore the potential of treating AIDS and HIV with traditional Chinese medicines.

Lin Ruichao, director of the Department of Traditional Chinese Medicine at the Beijing-based National Institute for the Control of Pharmaceuticals and Biological Products, was cited as saying there was "great potential" for traditional Chinese medicines to help treat HIV/AIDS.

So far though only one traditional medicine -- Tangcaopian -- has won a State Food and Drug Administration licence to be used to treat the disease.

Most of Henan's HIV/AIDS patients were infected through blood transfusions at illegal blood donor stations.

While the government says 35,000 people are infected in Henan, experts estimate at least one million farmers in the province alone contracted HIV/AIDS in the blood trade.

No-one has ever been held responsible.

KABUL (AFP) - In the country which gave birth to the Taliban movement and where Islam rules supreme, a small revolution is taking place. Next week an aid agency will begin a major condom campaign in conservative Afghanistan -- without using the word 'sex'.

The Washington-based social marketing group Population Services International (PSI) has already begun to distribute about 1.6 million 'Number One' condoms for sale at the subsidised price of one Afghani (2 US cents) in the pharmacies and grocery stores of five major cities.

The project which began quietly in January in the Afghan capital Kabul has already been a success, organisers say.

But they face their biggest challenge when they begin a "culturally adapted" public awareness campaign next week with radio spots, sponsorships and billboards advertising their birth control product.

"Nearly 400,000 condoms have been sold in four months," said PSI's Andrew Miller, explaining that the project answered a demand for condoms in Afghanistan.

But because of the cultural context "we must, however, adopt a soft approach so as not to offend Afghan sensitivities," he said.

Although no longer bound by the fundamentalist dictates of the Taliban, Afghan society remains profoundly conservative and sexually repressive. Sexual relations remain a taboo subject.

Prophylactics first appeared in Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion of the 1980s. Today they are widely available in most drug stores but are little used -- and always hidden.

The PSI awareness campaign will be suitably modest -- the condoms for sale will not be flavoured, perfumed, textured or labelled "extra fine".

'Number Ones' will be sold in navy cardboard packs of three with bright yellow writing devoid of sexual references. Only the "1" of the 'Number One' name evokes a vague phallic symbol, or so say the marketers, otherwise the packaging could be that of lollies, batteries or motor oil.

"It has been a real headache to translate the instructions (inside the packet) and to design packaging which doesn't shock," said Emmanuel de Dinechin of Altai Consulting which advised on the product.

"Afghans' ignorance about sexuality is abysmal, the work of educating them is immense," he added.

And not without cultural barriers. For example it would be unthinkable to use a diagram to illustrate how to put on a condom. Or to directly translate into local languages Dari and Pashto instructions issued with condoms in Western countries. Some words -- like 'sex' -- are simply not acceptable.

"For the publicity campaign, we must use very neutral slogans," said Miller.

PSI abandoned their initial slogan -- "Have a smaller family" -- as unsuitable for the country where a woman is expected to have five or six babies.

The more vague, "Have a more comfortable life, make your family Number One" will be used instead.

"This will be discreet marketing but at the same time very widespread, Afghans will become familiar with 'Number One'," Miller said.

Financed by the US Agency for International Development, the 5 million dollar programme also plans to distribute female contraceptives, including the pill, as well as water purification and anti-mosquito products.

All these items have received approval for distribution from the Afghan Ministry of Health.

With hardly a dozen cases of HIV/AIDSofficially registered in Afghanistan, the promotion of condoms here is not about safe sex or fewer pregnancies.

PSI says it is more about encouraging couples to better space the birth of their children and thus fight against Afghanistan's alarming maternal mortality rate, one of the highest in the world.