AIDS as lethal as WMD: Powell

US Secretary of State Colin Powell has said that India, China and Russia should recognise its gravity and deal with the disease.

Terming AIDS as a "weapon of mass destruction" which claims 8,000 lives a day, US Secretary of State Colin Powell has said countries like India, China and Russia should recognise its gravity and deal with the disease.

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India, China and Russia should realise the seriousness of the problem and deal with AIDS, which is fast becoming a "weapon of mass destruction,", Powell told a US television network.

"One of the countries the US gave funding and will give funding, as part of the emergency plan, is Vietnam. It is a large country. The infection rate is fairly small now, but we can see the potential for that infection to grow rapidly. So this is the time to help the Vietnamese to deal with this problem," Powell told Public Broadcasting System in an interview.

There are too many countries in the world, especially in Africa, where they don't want to see this problem. It somehow goes against their culture, he said.

"We want to get in as early as we can with education, with training, with abstinence, with the use of condoms, with the use of anti-retroviral drugs, with all of the other things, with sanitation, with food programmes, with development programmes.

"So that people don't succumb to other infectious diseases because they have been weakened by HIV, or they don't succumb to HIV because they have been weakened by other infectious diseases."