The once prudish Chinese government is hoping to make condom use as common as eating cabbage and will distribute more than 300 million of them to help curb AIDS.

The government has signed a deal with the Gaobang Latex Products Manufacturing Company for 305 million condoms that will be purchased by a special HIV/AIDS fund, Xinhua news agency said.

The condoms will be distributed to local centers for disease control which will deliver them to hotels and public entertainment places. Forty-two hotels in the provincial capital of Guilin have already received batches, it said.

"If people could get a condom as conveniently and naturally as buying a Chinese cabbage, the AIDS prevention function carried out by condoms could finally imbue people's lives and change their bias (against condoms)," Tao Ran, of the China Youth HIV/AIDS Prevention and Care Fund, told Xinhua.

Official statistics show that among China's 840,000 people living with HIV/AIDS, 45 percent were infected through intravenous drug use and 25 percent through blood transfusions.

Some 30 percent were infected through unsafe sex, and that figure has been rising steadily.

Health experts have called for "100 percent" condom use programs throughout China, a campaign that will use "no condom, no sex" as its slogan.

The programs are already in effect in the provinces of Hubei, Yunnan and Jiangsu and are expected to be implemented elsewhere soon, the report said.

Former US president Bill Clinton's AIDS foundation has committed to providing free anti-HIV/AIDS drugs to infected children in China, foundation officials said Sunday.

"It hasn't been publicly announced but it has been made known to officials in China. We're willing to provide drugs for as many kids as needed," Aaron Pattillo, a drug procurement specialist for the Clinton Foundation, told AFP.

In June the foundation begun treating an initial 200 HIV-positive children identified by the government as being in need of the drugs.

Treatment will now be expanded to some 2,000 patients, said Jessica Haberer, a Beijing-based research advisor for the Clinton Foundation.

"We don't know the actual number of kids who need the drugs, but we'll treat up to 2,000 and we're actually going to work with the government to try and identify more kids and if there are more, we will not leave them uncared for," Haberer said.

"I'm sure there are many many more kids who need the drugs."

Most of the children identified contracted HIV from their parents, many of whom were poor farmers in central China who became infected after selling blood in the 1990s. Other youngsters were infected from blood transfusions.

China, which for years ignored the plight of the infected farmers, has in recent years begun providing patients with free anti-HIV/AIDS drugs manufactured domestically. However, its pharmaceutical companies do not make drugs suitable for child victims.

China admits it has more than 840,000 HIV/AIDS patients, but international and domestic independent health organizations estimate there are many more.

The Clinton Foundation is working with Chinese health authorities to help it obtain second line anti-HIV/AIDS drugs to treat adult patients who are resistant to first line treatment.

The two foundation officials were speaking after a ceremony in Beijing hosted by Clinton to celebrate a programme set up by his foundation to train Chinese doctors in the United States so they in turn can treat HIV/AIDS patients in rural areas and train local doctors.

Clinton Sunday praised the progress made by China, but said "there's much more to do".

One problem he highlighted was the disparity in health care services between China's urban and rural areas.

"Most of the expertise in dealing with HIV/AIDS is found in urban areas ... but most HIV/AIDS patients are in rural areas," Clinton said.

A rubber company in China has begun marketing condoms under the brand names Clinton and Lewinsky, apparently seeking to exploit the White House affair that led to the impeachment of America's 42nd president.

Spokesman Liu Wenhua of the Guangzhou Rubber Group said the company was handing out 100,000 free Clinton and Lewinsky condoms as part of a promotion to raise consumer awareness of its new products.

He said that after the promotion ends, the Clinton condoms will go on sale in southern China for 29.8 Yuan ($3.72) for a box of 12, while the Lewinsky model will be priced at 18.8 Yuan ($2.35) for the same quantity.

"The Clinton condom will be the top of our line," he said. "The Lewinsky condom is not quite as good."

Liu said the company had chosen to use the Clinton name because consumers viewed the former president as a responsible person, who would want to stress safe sex as an effective way to prevent the spread of the HIV virus.

"The names we chose are symbols of people who are responsible and dedicated to their jobs," he said. "I believe Bill Clinton cannot be unhappy about this because he's a very generous man."

Liu said the company did not believe using the Clinton and Lewinsky names constituted a violation of copyright or other laws.

"We have received full approval from the local Industrial and Commercial Bureau to start production," he said.

Clinton has campaigned aggressively for heightened AIDS awareness in China, where the disease is spreading rapidly.

In impeachment proceedings conducted by the U.S. Senate in 1999, he was acquitted on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. The charges stemmed from denials he made about a sexual relationship he maintained with Lewinsky, a former White House intern.

Drug resistance combined with a deadly double infection of tuberculosis and HIV is posing a serious threat in Cambodia, Vietnam, China and the Philippines, said the World Health Organization.

The WHO said tuberculosis was the leading cause of death in HIV-AIDS patients in the Asia-Pacific region and growing resistance to a variety of drugs is fuelling a rise in cases.

Tuberculosis is a bacterial disease that mostly attacks the lungs. It is an opportunistic infection that once contracted by a HIV patient sees each disease speed the progress of the other.

In the Western Pacific, which stretches from China to Fiji, more than 1.5 million people were living with HIV/AIDS at the end of 2004 and about 120,000 people are expected to die of AIDS in 2005, said a WHO report on tuberculosis and HIV-AIDS.

People with HIV are up to 50 times more likely to develop tuberculosis (TB).

"HIV and TB are the leading killers among the infectious diseases today and together they form a deadly partnership," said the report released on Friday at a WHO conference in Noumea, capital of New Caledonia in the South Pacific.

"In the region, TB-HIV has not reached epidemic proportions but is already serious in some areas," it said.

The Asia-Pacific region accounts for a third of global TB cases, with China, Cambodia, Vietnam and the Philippines representing 80 percent of the region's tuberculosis, said the U.N. health body.

The WHO estimates tuberculosis is spreading globally at a rate of one person per second. Every year eight to 10 million people contract the disease and two million die, it said.

The WHO said a global target of reducing tuberculosis prevalence and deaths by half from 1999 to 2010 was in jeopardy because of a rise in TB-HIV, warning tuberculosis deaths could rise significantly unless the fight against TB-HIV was intensified.

"TB-HIV co-infection threatens to reverse the steady progress toward achieving this goal," said Dr Shigeru Omi, WHO Regional Director for the Western Pacific.

The WHO said greater surveillance of the deadly co-infection and better access to medicines in developing countries was required to stem the spread of tuberculosis and reduce the death rate.

WHO's Western Pacific regional adviser on tuberculosis, Dr Dongil Ahn, said the emergence of multi-drug resistant (MDR) tuberculosis, particularly in China and Mongolia, was making the fight against the disease more difficult.

Ahn said that in three of the Chinese provinces where MDR surveys were undertaken, up to 10 percent of new patients were due to MDR. In Mongolia, around 18 percent of prisoners with TB had multi-drug resistance.

"It is very hard to treat and the cost of TB medication for MDR is very high, about 100 times the cost of medicine for ordinary TB," Ahn said.

The cost of treating ordinary tuberculosis is about $240 a year, compared with $1,500 to $2,000 for MDR/TB, he said.

First lady Laura Bush, addressing a group of her African peers about the AIDS crisis on their continent, said Thursday that education and compassion were the keys to progress in stopping the spread of the deadly disease.

"Experience teaches us that we can turn the tide on this epidemic," Bush told the opening ceremony of the General Assembly of the Organization of African First Ladies Against HIV/AIDS. "Compassion calls us to work in partnership to alleviate suffering around the world because of HIV/AIDS."

She was introduced at the Manhattan meeting by Jeanette Kagame, wife of Rwandan President Paul Kagame. The organization of African first ladies was founded in 2002 to find solutions for the AIDS problem in Africa, home to the world's largest population of people with HIV/AIDS.

Sub-Saharan Africa is home to more than 60 percent of all people with HIV, but accounts for just over 10 percent of the world's population, according to the Joint United Nations Program on AIDS. Last year, 2.3 million people in sub-Saharan Africa died of AIDS.

"Africa's progress is best measured in hope," Bush told the group. "Only a few years ago, people viewed HIV positive diagnoses as a death sentence ... to be endured in shame and isolation.

"Today, people who are HIV positive have hope."

This summer, Mrs. Bush visited South Africa, Tanzania and Rwanda to spread the word of American help for the continent. Kagame, in her introduction, mentioned that trip.

"Mrs. Bush saw our beautiful country and people," Kagame said. "But she also saw the suffering of those with this disease."

Bush, who was greeted warmly by the group, stressed the importance of teaching people about the disease.

"Education is the key to eliminating the spread of the disease, because it encourages people to seek treatment and raises the awareness of prevention," she said. Bush added that it was important for people with the disease to come forward as a way of destigmatizing the illness.

She told the story of meeting a woman during her African trip this summer. The woman told the first lady about a visit with her family where she acknowledged for the first time that she was HIV positive.

The woman's sister began weeping, then said she too was positive. Her brother then made the same admission.

"Because of one woman's courage, a whole family is now receiving treatment," Bush said.