VATICAN CITY, Dec 1 (AFP) - The Vatican called Monday on governments worldwide to promote the virtue of chastity, saying it offered the best protection against the virus that causes AIDS.

In a message to mark World AIDS Day, the Vatican's health minister, Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan, urged international and national authorities to reject awareness campaigns based on "policies that encourage immoral, hedonistic lifestyles and behaviour and help spread AIDS."

They should instead educate people to adopt "the culture of life and responsible love," he said.

But Barragan also called for medical treatment to be made more widely available to AIDS sufferers "so as to halt the scandalous loss of life" in poor countries.

Governments must "take up the burden of the social, humanitarian and health needs of orphaned children who are becoming ever more numerous with the spread of AIDS," he said.

They should also strive to make health a global good and crack down on all forms of discrimination against people infected with the HIV virus or suffering from full-blown AIDS, he said.

The Roman Catholic church will soon publish a pastoral handbook on AIDS, Barragan said.

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