By Kamil Zaheer

NEW DELHI, April 17 (Reuters) - Only 19 percent of Asians who need AIDS drugs receive them, a World Health Organisation (WHO) report said on Tuesday, calling for a surge in treatment to meet a 2010 goal for universal access.

South, southeast and east Asia, including India with the world's highest caseload of HIV-positive people, all lag behind Sub-Saharan Africa, where 28 percent of people needing treatment received it in 2006, the report said.

"Universal access by 2010 will require a steep increase in the number of people starting treatment every year," said the report, which is entitled "Towards Universal Access: Scaling up priority HIV/AIDS interventions in the health sector".

In 2006, the U.N. General Assembly agreed to work towards universal access to "comprehensive prevention programmes, treatment, care and support" by 2010.

Asia compares poorly with the Caribbean and Latin America where overall treatment coverage is around 72 percent, although 280,000 people in south, southeast and east Asia were on anti-AIDS treatment in 2006, a four-fold jump over 2003.

The WHO report is backed by the United Nations' anti-AIDS agency (UNAIDS) and UNICEF. Its figures excluded Central Asia.

In east, south and southeast Asia, there are 7.8 million people living with HIV out of the world's total of nearly 40 million cases. Two thirds of those infected globally are in Sub-Saharan Africa.

India, with 5.7 million people living with HIV/AIDS, falls way behind South Africa -- home to the second-highest number of people with the virus -- in terms of treatment.

India has only around 100,000 people on treatment while South Africa has 325,000. Referring to India, the report said: "This is far short of the total need."

Some 520,000 Indians need AIDS drugs.

Asia does better than Sub-Saharan Africa on treatment for children but, on both continents, the majority of children needing drugs do not receive them, the report said.

Only an estimated 13 percent of the 680,000 children under 15 in Sub-Saharan Africa who need anti-AIDS drugs receive them, while in Asia it is 21 percent of an estimated 64,000 children.

"The progression of untreated disease in children is particularly aggressive," the report said.

India, with its multi-billion-dollar AIDS prevention programme, is one of the key focus countries in the report.

Despite its high-profile prevention drive, less than three percent of HIV-positive pregnant women in India received drugs for prevention of viral transmission from mother to child in 2005.

This is lower than such African nations as Mozambique and Zimbabwe.

On interventions to prevent the spread of HIV among injecting drug users, the WHO report said China, with an estimated 650,000 HIV-positive people, had trebled the number of its needle and syringe programmes to 392 in 2006 from 130 in 2005.

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