BEIJING (AFP) - An art exhibition depicting how women living with HIV are viewed in China has opened here in a bid to dispel strong public discrimination against AIDS patients, state media said.

Twenty-nine works are on show at the "Her Beauty" exhibition with each exhibit created by Chinese women living with HIV.

"Though the artists are not professional, their paintings will show the public how sad and lonely the people with HIV feel," said 22-year-old Song Pengfei, chief organizer of the exhibition who is also HIV positive.

A survey released by the Ministry of Health Friday found 58.9 percent of Chinese shun people with HIV/AIDS, the Xinhua news agency reported.

A key reason for the strong prejudice is that most Chinese have little understanding of AIDS.

"Social stigma, public ignorance, and fears around people with HIV are the major obstacles China faces in combating the deadly disease," said Joel Rehnstrom, country coordinator of UNAIDS China.

According to a recent United Nations report, at least 190,000 women between the ages of 15 and 49 in China have HIV/AIDS, an increase of 60,000 in the past three years.

The art exhibition will be shown in seven universities in Beijing and six in the coastal city of Qingdao in east China.

China says it has an estimated 840,000 HIV/AIDS patients although international AIDS experts say the actual number is much higher. The United Nations predicts China could have 10 million cases by 2010.

BEIJING (AFP) - Dozens of people have been detained or placed under house arrest, as the trial of a high-profile Beijing activist opens in a local court, said some of the detainees.

One wheelchair-bound supporter said she was beaten by police ahead of the court appearance of activist Ye Guozhu, detained in August after applying to organize a 10,000-strong demonstration in Beijing and later formally arrested on charges of disturbing social order.

His son Ye Mingjun told AFP that at least two people were taken into police custody and some 20 more prevented from leaving their homes by police as they tried to go to the Dongcheng district court.

"At least 20 people have been put under police surveillance," the 22-year-old said outside the court.

The court refused to comment Saturday but one supporter who was present said the case had been adjourned after charges were laid against Ye at a morning hearing.

Another supporter Ni Yulan, who said she is confined to a wheelchair after receiving spinal injuries in a police beating in 2002, claimed she was dragged into the Xinjiekou police station and kicked by officers after being picked up from her home while preparing to go to the court.

"I was thrown on the floor and dragged into the police station. Then they kicked me several times," she said.

Police refused to comment.

Many of those who tried to turn up to the trial were supporters of Ye, who had been protesting since being thrown out of his former home in May 2003 to make way for demolitions.

High-profile HIV/AIDS activist Hu Jia told AFP he has been under police surveillance since Friday afternoon and was prevented from leaving home early Saturday when he tried to go to the court.

Hu said was also planning to go to hospital later in the day as he was sick with acute Hepatitis B.

"I said I needed to go to the hospital but police said I couldn't leave 'for the sake of security and stability'," he said.

Internet dissident Liu Di, who was held in prison for a year after posting political essays online, was detained for four hours Saturday morning after being picked up by police outside the court.

"I have just been sent home but they won't let me go out," the 24-year-old said.

BEIJING (AFP) - China has begun promoting the use of condoms in the runup to World AIDS Day, allowing advertisements and condom dispensers to be prominently displayed in the Chinese capital at least.The effort is aimed at fighting a 40 percent annual increase in HIV/AIDS.

Previously considered improper, the ads cover billboards in the capital's subway stations and at a popular nightlife haunt, Sanlitun Bar Street.

More than 40 AIDS billboards, including those that promote the use of condoms and caution against risky sexual behavior, have been set up along both sides of Bar Street before World AIDS Day on December 1.

Last month the city also erected two condom vending machines on both ends of Sanlitun street, in addition to five free condom dispensers in bars.

Another 100 more would be added by the end of the year, Xinhua news agency cited officials as saying.

AIDS activists said the move seemed to be a new initiative.

"I've never seen condom machines or AIDS-prevention billboards in Sanlitun," said Beijing-based activist Hu Jia.

Until recently, the country was too embarrassed to talk about condom use and the government was criticized for not facing up to its HIV/AIDS problem.

China's first condom advertisement -- appearing on 80 buses in southern Guangzhou city in 1998 -- only survived for 33 days before being pulled off, according to Xinhua.

A TV commercial run by the country's largest TV network CCTV in 1999 and promoting condom use aired for just one day before being canceled.

In October this year six ministries jointly issued a report calling for more AIDS prevention ads to be displayed in public places, including shopping and recreation areas, bus and railway stations, ports and airports.

"China's State Administration for Industry and Commerce bans family planning products from being advertised," an official at China's center for disease control and prevention told AFP.

"The ban still exists but condom ads that are aimed at preventing HIV/AIDS are allowed, with most of them focused around this period."

Beijing this year has 80 AIDS-prevention posters in subway stations and nearly 600 advertisements in subway trains, as well as the 40 billboards.

Some 83 ads will soon be put up in airports around the country, Xinhua said.

However a free needle exchange program launched in Beijing has not seen a single patron since it began last month, with Beijing health officials saying drug addicts might fear being detained by police, Xinhua said in a separate report.

The center for disease control said addicts' would not be caught and their privacy would be protected. But distrust of the police runs high, especially because drug users are often locked up or forced to join labor camps.

Next week Beijing will start another AIDS prevention program -- offering methadone treatment to drug users -- which experts believe will be more effective.

Such programs are still relatively new to China as the government has been reluctant to give the impression it was condoning drug use.

Experts have warned that unless China acts quickly to slow the rapid spread of AIDS, it will expand from relatively isolated groups to the general population, mainly through sexual promiscuity.

China University Puts Halt to Condom Handout

Wed 24 November, 2004 10:28

BEIJING (Reuters) - China has halted a plan to distribute free condoms on university campuses, quashing the AIDS prevention effort only a week before World AIDS Day, state media said Wednesday.

University authorities said the distribution of 1,000 condoms at the elite Peking University had not been approved by the college administration in a society where sex before marriage is frowned upon.

"College authorities might think the handout will stir up unnecessary disputes, as the campus is considered pure," the official Xinhua news agency quoted Dr Sun Peiyuan, one of the organizers of the event, as saying.

China was slow to acknowledge the AIDS epidemic and says it has fewer than 1 million cases.

However, experts say at least that number were infected in the central province of Henan alone as a result of a blood-selling scheme.

The United Nations has warned the number of AIDS victims in China could rise to 10 million by 2010 unless it takes serious steps to educate the public and fight the epidemic.

Sun said students with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, had been found at Beijing's universities since 2000.

The head of Peking University's campus hospital said the university supported condom use but that it was inappropriate to hand out free condoms openly on campus.

"We should put more emphasis on guiding college students not to have pre-marriage sex. Condom use only serves as a secondary method for educating those who can't control themselves," Zhou Baohua was quoted as saying.

However, the campus has condom vending machines and a Beijing health official said last month the city would install 1,000 machines throughout the capital to help to fight AIDS.

By EMMA ROSS, AP Medical Writer

LONDON - The women's rights movement and the AIDS movement must come together if the world is to ultimately win the fight against HIV, the United Nations said in a report released Tuesday.

Women and girls in the developing world are increasingly becoming its main victims, but current safe-sex prevention strategies are of little use to the millions who don't have the power to say no to sex or to insist on condom use.

The inequality women face — from poverty and stunted education, to rape and denial of women's inheritance and property rights — is a major obstacle to victory over the virus, according to the latest global HIV status report published by UNAIDS.

The core of HIV prevention is advice to abstain from sex until marriage, be faithful and to use condoms.

"The prevention strategies now in place are missing the point when it comes to women and girls," Dr. Kathleen Cravero, deputy chief of UNAIDS told a news conference. "We are finding in most regions of the world, they simply do not have the economic and social power or choices, or control over their lives to put that information into practice."

AIDS prevention strategies need to address the factors that will give women control over their lives, the report said.

"Moving to a situation where every woman gets to keep her house, her land and her furniture when her partner dies is not beyond the realm of possibility," Cravero said. "It doesn't even require turning society on its head. It requires getting the right laws there and making them enforceable for women."

AIDS has to be the catalyst for women's rights in the developing world, UNAIDS chief Dr. Peter Piot told The Associated Press.

"There was reason enough before AIDS, but now the link between the whole gender inequality and death has never been so direct as with AIDS," Piot said. "If AIDS is not enough to shift the agenda for women, then what is enough?"

"It's time now for the women's movement and the AIDS movement to find each other, and that hasn't happened yet," Piot said. "Ultimately, without putting women at the heart of the response to AIDS, I don't think we will be able to control this epidemic."

Violence against women is a worldwide scourge, but it is feeding the HIV epidemics in the developing world, where women and girls often don't have the power to say no to sex or to insist on condom use.

For millions of women, sex is their only currency.

"The fact that the balance of power in many relationships is tilted in favor of men can have life-or-death implications," concluded the report by UNAIDS. "These factors are not easily dislodged or altered, but until they are, efforts to contain and reverse the AIDS epidemic are unlikely to achieve sustained success."

Nearly 50 percent of the 39.4 million people infected with HIV worldwide are women. In regions where the epidemic has been raging for years, more women are infected than men, and in countries where epidemics are just beginning, new infections among women outnumber those among men and the gap continues to widen.

East Asia experienced the sharpest increase in the number of women infected with HIV in the past two years — 56 percent. Eastern Europe and Central Asia come next, with infections among women rising 48 percent in the past two years. In the Caribbean, which is the second-worst hit area of the world after sub-Saharan Africa, young women are twice as likely as men their age to become infected.

Part of the reason for the rapid increase is that it is physically easier for women to get HIV through intercourse than it is for men to get it from women. However, more women than men are now getting the disease also because the virus has escaped the confines of brothels.

Twelve years ago, about 90 percent of HIV transmission in Thailand occurred between prostitutes and their clients. But now, about half of all infections are occurring in the wives of men who visit prostitutes.

In many parts of the world, stressing marriage and long-term monogamous relationships doesn't protect women from AIDS because they are unable to control whether they have sex. The approach — favored by the American anti-AIDS package — also could backfire in areas where being married actually increases the risk of contracting HIV, research has found.

One study conducted in several areas of Kenya and Zambia found that among teenage girls, HIV infection levels were 10 percent higher for married girls than for those who were sexually active but not married. Similar findings have been reported in Uganda.

Married women in some African countries are in more danger of HIV than unmarried ones because young women often marry men much older than themselves — for financial security — and these men are more sexually experienced and thus more exposed to HIV, the report found.

HIV increasingly striking women in Asia

Women in East Asia are contracting HIV at a faster rate than in the rest of the world, in many cases because men who have visited prostitutes are increasingly passing on the infection to their wives, the United Nations said Tuesday

In the world's two most populous countries, China and India, the use of injectable illicit drugs is also contributing to the spread of the disease, said health experts as the world body released its latest report on the global status of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

Win-Sie Cheng, regional adviser for HIV/AIDS for UNICEF, told a news conference in Bangkok that transmission from husbands to wives is the predominant pattern in Cambodia, Myanmar and Thailand, and some parts of China.

"Most women around the world are HIV-infected through their partners' high-risk behavior, over which they wield little or any control," she said.

In Thailand, about 90 percent of HIV transmissions 12 years ago were between prostitutes and their clients. But now, about half of all infections are occurring in the wives of men who visit prostitutes.

Some 2.3 million out of the 8.2 million people currently living with HIV in Asia are women _ an increase of 56 percent since 2002.

While national infection rates remain lower in Asia than in other parts of the world _ particularly Africa _ the large populations of many Asian countries mean that vast numbers of people are stricken.

The epidemic has claimed about 540,000 lives in Asia so far in 2004.

AIDS has now been detected in all parts of China, the world's most populous nation, spreading mainly through intravenous drug use and prostitution. It is also frequently transmitted sexually from injecting drug users to their partners in China.

HIV epidemics are raging in several states in India, the world's second biggest nation, said Purnima Mane of UNAIDS, the U.N. AIDS agency, at a news conference in New Delhi.

"In India, there has been a sharp rise in the number of people with HIV because of the use of infected syringes. These people then infected their partners as well," Mane said.

In Chennai, formerly known as Madras, nearly 26 percent of HIV cases were drug injectors in 2000, but they represented 64 percent of all cases by 2003, she said.

In Indonesia, which has the world's fourth largest population, the spread of HIV is largely confined to prisoners, drug users and commercial sex workers.

But U.N. officials in Jakarta expressed concern Tuesday that the virus could be spreading to the community at large, partly due to the refusal of drug addicts to use disposable syringes and men to wear condoms.

"Indonesia is a bit slow to become concerned about the problem," said Alan Boulton, who chairs of the U.N. theme group on HIV/AIDS in Indonesia.

Programs in Thailand and Cambodia to promote the use of condoms at prostitution venues have reduced the percentage of sex workers with HIV.

Bangladesh, East Timor, Laos, Pakistan and the Philippines, among some other Asian nations, have particularly low infection rates and still have the opportunity to thwart serious outbreaks, the report said.

Amnesty: Violence Against Women Is Spreading AIDS

It said many women also feel inhibited in seeking medical advice following rape because they are afraid of being stigmatized within their communities.

By Fayen Wong

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Singapore, facing a rise in AIDS cases, is considering making it compulsory for pregnant women to be screened for HIV/AIDS, an official said on Saturday.

"If all mothers had been tested for HIV, and treatment started for HIV positive mothers, the risk of the baby having AIDS would be reduced from 25 percent to 2 percent," said Balaji Sadasivan, senior minister of state for health, at the fourth Singapore AIDS Conference.

Although Singapore has one of the lowest levels of HIV infection in Asia, the number of new infections hit a record high with 257 cases reported in the first 10 months of this year, more than the 242 new cases reported for all of 2003.

Sadasivan said his ministry would focus on educating the public on HIV/AIDS prevention.

The campaign will focus on four areas: encouraging monogamy, the importance of condom use in casual sex, frequent testing for HIV for individuals with multiple sex partners and highlighting that it is a criminal offence to spread AIDS deliberately.

While most of the new HIV cases involved heterosexual men, the Health Ministry said HIV infection among gays has seen a surge over the last year, with 77 cases diagnosed in the first 10 months of this year against 54 for all of last year.

A gay group said a law banning gay sex in Singapore harmed efforts to educate gays about the dangers of unsafe sex.

"Since gay sex is illegal, how then can any agency or organization in Singapore promote safe sex among men ... without being complicit in abetting illegal activity?" Stuart Koe, chief executive officer of Asian gay group Fridae said in a statement on the group's Web site fridae.com.

The United Nations warned earlier this month that Asia-Pacific risks an AIDS crisis similar in scale to Africa's unless governments across the region step up efforts to control the relentless spread of the killer disease.

Singapore has recorded a total of 2,332 HIV infections to date, of whom 874 have died, 564 have full-blown AIDS and 894 show no symptoms.

HYDERABAD, India (Reuters) - India, home to the world's second-largest HIV population, may have found a perfect cocktail for safe sex -- a free condom with every bottle of alcohol sold at liquor shops.

The southern state of Andhra Pradesh has made it mandatory for liquor shops to hand out a free condom with every bottle of alcohol they sell from December 1, the World AIDS Day.

"The new measure is part of an awareness campaign among those who drink about the dangers of unsafe sex," K. Damayanti, head of the state-run AIDS Control Society, told Reuters.

The state government would supply the condoms free to shops and distribution would be monitored, she said.

India has the second biggest HIV population after South Africa, with 5.1 million cases. Experts fear it could soon reach the top slot as knowledge about the illness is scant.

Andhra Pradesh, a state of 76 million people, has the second highest number of HIV infections among Indian states with 470,000 cases. The western state of Maharashtra leads with about 700,000 cases.

Damayanti said many liquor shops in smaller towns in the large farming state already distributed condoms to customers. The latest move would take the campaign to cities as well.

Mandela urges everyone to fight AIDS

By Jeremy Lovell

LONDON (Reuters) - Former South African President Nelson Mandela, surrounded by rock stars, has launched a book of photographs of a major anti-AIDS concert with a call to ordinary people to take a lead in the fight against HIV/AIDS.

"We all have a responsibility to act. Each of us must do more. We are all leaders now and good leaders must lead," he told a news conference at the book launch in London on Thursday.

The 46664 concert in Cape Town last year took its name from Mandela's prison number during his nearly 27 years in apartheid jails. Some 30 artists from Bob Geldof to Bono took part and the concert was beamed to an audience of up to two billion people.

The frail 86-year-old said it was not enough to rely on governments and the international drug companies -- which were not doing enough -- to stop the disease that infects 37.2 million people worldwide.

Joined by Annie Lennox, Brian May, Roger Taylor, Peter Gabriel and Yusuf Islam -- all performers at the Cape Town concert -- Mandela declared that "46664 is to raise awareness and inspire acts to fight HIV/AIDS. It shows we all care. Only by working together can we stop the spread of HIV/AIDS."

"Every HIV infection can be prevented and every AIDS infection can be treated. Together we can make the dream a reality," he added.

John Samuel, chief executive of the Nelson Mandela Foundation, said he hoped that 46664 would have raised $15 million (8 million pounds) by the end of 2005 from the concert, a DVD, the book of photos and two further concerts next year.

Samuel said it was particularly important to put women at the forefront of the campaign to eradicate the killer disease.

"We won't change the world overnight, but we are taking one step at a time," Samuel said, urging Britain, which takes over leadership of the G8 group of leading industrialised countries in January and the EU presidency in July, to fight for action.

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