http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/monitoring/jmp2004/en/

Geneva, 19 August - The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria has signed a grant agreement worth US$ 32 million over two years for an HIV/AIDS program in China.

The recipient of the grant, “China CARES” (China Comprehensive Aids RESponse), is an extensive community-based HIV treatment, care and prevention program launched in 2003 by the Chinese Government in response to the worsening AIDS crisis in the country.

China is eligible for Global Fund grants as a lower-middle-income country, by World Bank definition, and is meeting additional requirements, including co-financing for the proposal. The Chinese Government is contributing approximately US$ 13.4 million dollars per year to the program. Global Fund resources are to be additional to that contribution, and will total US$ 98 million over the full five years of the program. In June 2004, the Board of the Global Fund approved a further HIV/AIDS grant proposal to China of US$ 24 million, currently in negotiation, which will target injecting drug users and commercial sex workers, both vulnerable populations at the heart of the epidemic in China.

Last year, according to a China CDC survey supported by WHO, UNAIDS and US CDC, there were an estimated 840,000 people living with the virus in China.

The Global Fund grant will facilitate the rapid expansion of the China CARES program. Seven provinces (Anhui, Hebei, Shandong, Henan, Hubei, Shanxi, Shaanxi) targeted in the proposal are in urgent need of a comprehensive prevention and care response due to a high HIV case burden fuelled by paid plasma donations in the early and mid 1990s. This practice affected large numbers of rural poor who repeatedly sold plasma at blood collection points. These blood collectors often pooled everyone's blood to extract the valuable plasma, and then returned the blood to the donor to avoid anemia and so that the process could be repeated in a few days. Thus one infected donor would infect the entire pool of donors.

Those unsafe procedures have now been banned. But their consequence is that there is now a major wave of "former plasma donors" concentrated in specific locations in Central China which is experiencing symptoms of HIV infection. Many have progressed to AIDS, thousands have died, and there are growing numbers of orphans.

In some of the more affected villages, in excess of 20 percent of the people were infected. Here, urgent provision of treatment and care are demanded. In addition, prevention efforts will be undertaken by the program to reduce transmissions through spouses, mother-to-child, casual partners and unsafe/unnecessary medical injections. Within the targeted counties, HIV treatment and care will also be offered to others who need it, including injecting drug users, commercial sex workers and others, without discrimination.

The proposed project aims at rapidly increasing the number of people under antiretroviral (ARV) treatment, using all first-regimen drugs provided free by the government and involves a pioneering project to provide free ARV treatment to some 3,000 former plasma donors in Henan and four other provinces. In order to make ARV drugs more readily available, the government has also licensed two domestic drug companies to manufacture generic ARVs, and it has waived tariffs on imported ARVs.

Other activities of the project include advocacy, communication, a range of preventive services, voluntary counseling and testing, treatment of opportunistic infections, and community-based care and support. In addition, activities associated with capacity building, management and governance of the project are included as part of the proposal.

The expanded China CARES program will provide a solid basis from which China can take a further major step forward to a fully scaled-up program of treatment, care and prevention during the remaining years of the decade. The program also demonstrates high-level political commitment to fight the disease, and the government is working toward the universal provision of free ARVs for all who need them.

GENEVA, Aug. 11 (Xinhuanet) -- Global youth unemployment has risen to record high levels over the past decade with people aged 15 to 24 now representing nearly half the world's jobless, the International Labor Organization (ILO) says in a report released Wednesday.

"Global Employment Trends for Youth 2004", a study prepared by the ILO's Employment Strategy Department, found that some 88 million young people are unemployed worldwide.

The study says that while the youth sector represents a quarterof the working age population (aged 15 to 64), young people made up some 47 percent of the total 186 million people out of work worldwide in 2003.

The report says the 2003 global youth unemployment rate of 14.4percent is more than 25 per cent higher than the level of 10 yearsago.

Youth unemployment rates in 2003 were highest in the Middle East and North Africa (25.6 percent), sub-Saharan Africa (21 percent), countries classified as transitional economies (18.6 percent), Latin America and the Caribbean (16.6 percent), Southeast Asia (16.4 percent), South Asia (13.9 percent), countries with industrialized economies (13.4 percent) and East Asia (7.0 percent).

But the problem goes far beyond the large number of young unemployed people, the ILO says. Young people represent some 130 million of the world's 550 million working poor who work but are unable to lift themselves and their families above the equivalent of one US dollar per day poverty line.

It says young people have more difficulty in finding work than their adult counterparts and those who can find work often face long working hours, short-term or informal contracts, low pay and little or no social protection such as social security or other social benefits.

Tackling youth unemployment and the consequent vulnerabilities and feelings of exclusion would be a significant contribution to the global economy, the ILO believes.

According to the report, halving the world youth unemployment rate would add at least 2.2 trillion US dollars to global GDP, equal to around four percent of the 2003 global GDP value. Furthermore, the report points out that people who get a good start to working life are less likely to experience prolonged unemployment later.

"We are wasting an important part of the energy and talent of the most educated youth generation the world has ever had," said ILO Director-General Juan Somavia in the report.

"Enlarging the chances of young people to find and keep decent work is absolutely critical to achieving the UN Millennium Development Goals," he added. Enditem

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2004-08/11/content_1761648.htm