The United States is giving China US$15 million to help fight growing AIDS infections in some of the country's poorest areas under a five-year joint program announced yesterday.

　　The program aims to improve disease surveillance, prevention efforts and patient care in 10 Chinese regions, including Henan Province, where some villages have the world's highest rates of AIDS.

　　Tens of thousands of people there were infected by the virus in the 1990s by an unsanitary blood-buying industry in the country.

　　China says it has 840,000 people who carry the AIDS virus and 80,000 with full-blown AIDS.

　　Reported numbers of new HIV infections are growing by 30 percent a year, and health experts warn that China could have 10 million infected people by 2020 if it doesn't take urgent action.

　　"China can still prevent HIV/AIDS from reaching catastrophic proportions," said US Ambassador Clark T. Randt at a ceremony to launch the joint program. "However, such a catastrophe can only be avoided if China responds urgently and forcefully, with sufficient resources to stem this deadly tide."

　　Most of China's infections are blamed on intravenous drug use and the sale of contaminated blood, but health authorities say the number of cases resulting from sexual contact has doubled since 1997 to 10 percent.

　　Other areas covered in the new program are the provinces of Heilongjiang in the northeast and Anhui in the east, Inner Mongolia and the Xinjiang autonomous regions in the north.

　　(The Associated Press)