The Government is to seek help from UN experts in an effort to cut the transmission of HIV through childbirth.
A health programme will focus on Henan, one of the provinces worst hit by Aids.
Public education centres will be set up in Xinyang city's Shihe district and in Maidian city's Shangcai county under an agreement reached by Unicef and officials from the Health Ministry and their colleagues in the provincial Government.
An information official with Unicef's Beijing office, Charles Rycroft, hailed the agreement. 'Unicef is the first UN agency to be invited to work with HIV/Aids in this area. An international consultant has also been hired to help plan a wider approach to the mother-and-child HIV care issues nationwide and for the project in Henan,' Mr Rycroft said.
The centres will focus on providing screening, health-care information and modern medical techniques to reduce transmission of the virus in the womb.
'An estimated 600,000 newborns [worldwide] will begin their lives each year carrying HIV acquired from their mothers, a virus that will kill many in infancy and allow few to survive beyond adolescence,' Dr Dennis Blakeslee wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
'But with drugs and proper obstetrical care, rates of [mother to baby] transmission of HIV can be reduced substantially and, in some settings, transmission can be eliminated almost entirely.'