Former US President Bill Clinton praised the Chinese government yesterday for its decision to help poor AIDS patients receive treatment and said the SARS epidemic demonstrated dramatically how countries and companies must collaborate to fight disease.

　　"We cannot escape each other's fate," Clinton told a symposium convened at the prestigious Tsinghua University in Beijing to discuss how to fight acquired immune deficiency syndrome and severe acute respiratory syndrome.

　　Clinton said anti-AIDS drugs must become more affordable and said it was unconscionable that people across the world were dying because they couldn't pay for treatment.

　　"This medicine issue is an international scandal," Clinton said. "Money shouldn't determine who lives and dies from AIDS."

　　Last week, Chinese Executive Vice Health Minister Gao Qiang said 5,000 HIV and AIDS patients with "financial difficulties" will receive free treatment through next year. He also said central and local governments have committed US million to set up anti-AIDS units.

　　Clinton said such initiatives could help ensure that China's efforts to make economic progress aren't undermined.

　　He said the central government in Beijing, with its recent experience of fighting SARS, is in a unique position to effect change.

　　"The Chinese are famous for good planning," he said, adding: "AIDS kills more people in two hours than SARS killed in total."

　　Clinton also shook hands with Song Pengfei, 21, who was infected with AIDS several years ago by bad blood.

　　"I want to thank you for standing up and announcing in front of all these people that you were infected," Clinton said.

　　"...You have done a big favor for everybody in this room and for this country today by having the courage to stand up and say what you did, and I thank you," he said.

　　The one-day session gathered AIDS and SARS experts, government officials, doctors and educators to explore different approaches to fighting the maladies.

　　Dr David Ho, executive director of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in New York, said the number of AIDS patients in China was growing and called on China's government to act immediately.

　　"A large and comprehensive societal response is in order," Ho said. "If there is no health, there is no prosperity."

　　"This epidemic is not the sole responsibility of biomedical scientists and of health officials," he said. "This health challenge must come to the fore in the mind of every Chinese citizen."

　　Lack of education on AIDS has been a major cause of the spread of the disease.

　　Some say as many as a million people became infected due to blood-selling schemes in central Henan Province, where farmers were paid to have their plasma extracted and then had the remainder of the blood pumped back into them from tainted pools.

　　New HIV infections in China have been growing annually by about 30 percent. Chinese officials and the United Nations warn that 10 million people could be infected by 2020 without more effective prevention. HIV in China is mostly confined to intravenous drug users and people infected by the buying of tainted blood.

　　Ho, however, was optimistic that once set in motion, China's health and education sectors would be effective.

　　Huang Jiefu, China's deputy minister of health, said SARS underscored the need for collaboration. "We have learned from the SARS crisis that in today's world, there is no distinction between domestic diseases and international diseases," he said. "There is no island in the world today."