JOHANNESBURG – Two ethical controversies flared into life on World AIDS Day as the United States and South Africa backed sexual abstinence in their mix of programs to fight AIDS and British leader Tony Blair lashed at religious bans on condoms.

US President George W. Bush joined other leaders around the world in renewing a vow to combat a disease that has claimed more than 25 million lives in 25 years and for which a cure and vaccine remain dismayingly elusive.

“The pandemic of HIV/AIDS can be defeated, and the United States is willing to take the lead in that fight,” he said.

Bush spelt out Washington’s leading role as a funder for access to AIDS drugs in poor countries, but he also put a big emphasis on promoting abstinence.

That tactic is derided by many AIDS activists as moralising and unworkable, even potentially dangerous, for young people at the dawn of their sexual lives. These campaigners plead instead for sex education and access to condoms.

Fighting AIDS “includes the ABC approach, encouraging abstinence, being faithful, and using condoms, with abstinence as the only sure way to avoid the sexual transmission of HIV/AIDS,” said Bush.

South Africa used World AIDS Day to announce a new national plan for AIDS, setting the goal of 2011 for halving the annual toll of new HIV infections, notably by encouraging teenagers aged 14-17 to “delay the initiation of sex.”

“The future course of the epidemic hinges in many respects on the behaviour young people adopt and maintain,” according to the plan, launched by Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka.

South Africa is next to India in the highest number of HIV infections in the world. In a country of 47 million, 5.5 million are living with AIDS or the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) which causes it.

In Britain, meanwhile, Prime Minister Blair hit out at religious bans on condoms, saying “if all the churches and religious organizations were facing up to reality, it would be better.”

“The danger is if we have a sort of blanket ban coming from religious hierarchy saying it’s wrong to do it, then you discourage people from doing it in circumstances where they need to protect their own lives,” he said.

Blair made the remarks as the Vatican is considering a 100-page report on condoms that has been requested byPope Benedict XVI.

Since AIDS was first discovered in a small group of US gay men, it has killed at least 25 million people and nearly 40 million people today have HIV/AIDS, according to the UN agency UNAIDS.

Despite billions of dollars poured into research, there is neither a cure nor a vaccine.

The distribution of drugs that curb HIV, transforming a killer disease into a manageable one, is only now reaching a higher gear in Africa, where nearly two-thirds of infected people live.

In Guinea-Bissau, thousands of students demonstrated for free HIV treatment in a country where 88 percent of people live on less than a dollar a day.

But there were encouraging signs in the African continent’s fight against AIDS, with an apparent decline in adult prevalence in a number of countries, the World Health Organisation said on Friday.

In Geneva, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) on Friday said the AIDS pandemic would exact a growing toll on the workforce in the years to come.

In 2005, 3.4 million people of working age died of AIDS, and the toll is likely to rise to 4.5 million by 2020, it said.

“Twenty-five years into AIDS, nations rich and poor still think about the pandemic from an emergency perspective of quick fixes and short-term goals,” UNAIDS Executive Director Peter Piot said in a commentary published by the Financial Times.

Countries in Asia — where the AIDS situation varies widely — vowed on Friday to step up their action.

China resolved to promote condom use among its homosexuals, amid data showing only one Chinese gay in five uses them regularly.

“Prevention efforts among gays will be key to the country’s AIDS control,” said Wu Zunyou of the Chinese Disease Prevent and Control Centre.

In India, which has 5.7 million infected people, protestors demanded low-cost treatment for people in the later stages of the illness, while in neighbouring Bangladesh, a rally outside parliament in Dhaka drew a crowd of thousands.

In Bangkok, a condom carnival promoted safe-sex with dart-throwing to pop condom balloons and races to blow up condoms.

The theme of this year’s World’s AIDS Day is accountability.

“Accountability… requires every president and prime minister, every parliamentarian and politician, to decide and declare that ‘AIDS stops with me,'” said UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.