LOS ANGELES, Dec. 1 (Xinhua) -- U.S. Senator Barack Obama, a potential presidential hopeful, took a public AIDS test on Friday to encourage others to follow suit in Lake Forest, California.

    While attending a church-organized anti-AIDS conference, Democratic Obama of Illinois encouraged all others to take the test whether or not they have the disease, the Los Angeles City News Service reported.

    Obama called on other people in public life to take the test, because "It's time for us to set an example for others to follow."

    "We are all sick because of AIDS, and we are all tested by this crisis," said Obama. "It is a test not only of our willingness to respond, but of our ability to look past the artificial divisions and debates that have often shaped that response."

    Obama also took a highly-publicized AIDS test in August during a trip to Africa.

    Obama said efforts to stop the spread of the disease are bogged down in moral and religious disputes over such issues as whether to promote the use of condoms.

    "These are issues of prevention we cannot walk away from," Obama said. "When a husband thinks it's acceptable to hide his infidelity from his wife, it's not only a sin, it's a potential death sentence."

    "And when rape is still seen as a woman's fault and a woman's shame, but promiscuity is a man's prerogative, it is a problem of the heart that no government can solve," Obama said.

    Obama said his getting tested for AIDS in public helps remove the stigma for others.

    "The idea that in some places, nine in 10 people with HIV have no idea they're infected is more than frightening -- it's a ticking time bomb waiting to go off," Obama said.

    "So we need to show people that just as there is no shame in going to the doctor for a blood test ... there is no shame in going for an HIV test," Obama said.

    "Today, the earlier you know, the faster you can get help," he said.

    But even as society works to slow the spread of AIDS, it has a responsibility to treat fairly the 40 million people worldwide who already have the disease, the senator noted.

    Wealthy countries know what works to save lives but they need to do more, Obama suggested. The United States, for example, through its emergency plan for AIDS relief, will contribute more than 15 billion dollars over five years to combat the disease overseas.

    "Our first priority in Congress should be to re-authorize this program when it expires in 2008," Obama said. "Our second priority should be to reassess what's worked and what hasn't so that we're not wasting one dollar that could be saving someone's life."

    The third priority, he said, should be to boost individual contributions to the efforts.

    "It's time for us to add at least an additional one billion dollars a year in new money over the next five years to strengthen and expand the program to places like Southeast Asia, India and Eastern Europe, where the pandemic will soon reach crisis proportions," Obama said.

    Like no other illness, Obama said, AIDS "tests our ability to put ourselves in someone else's shoes -- to empathize with the plight of our fellow man."

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