China HIV/AIDS cases up nearly 33 percent
Pastor Dale Morgan
Wednesday November 22, 2:10 PM Reuters
*China HIV/AIDS cases up nearly 33 percent
*
BEIJING (Reuters) - The number of reported HIV/AIDS cases in China has
grown by nearly 33 per cent so far this year, the Health Ministry said
on Wednesday, warning the virus seemed to be spreading from high-risk
groups to the general public.
The reported number of cases at the end of October had risen to 183,733,
up from 144,089 at the end of last year, the Ministry said in a
statement on its Web site (www.moh.gov.cn).
Of the reported cases diagnosed by government test centres and whose
diseases could thus be officially followed up, 40,667 had developed into
AIDS.
Experts from the United Nations and the Chinese Health Ministry estimate
about 650,000 people in China carried HIV at the end of December,
suggesting that many people were unaware they were infected.
Drug abuse accounted for 37 per cent of the newly found infections this
year whose transmission routes had been determined, while unsafe sexual
contact had caused 28 per cent, the Health Ministry said.
People selling blood illegally or receiving infected blood from
hospitals in the 1990s accounted for 5.1 percent, it added.
"Health officials attributed many of the new cases to better reporting
of existing cases, though they also warned that the virus seemed to be
spreading from high-risk groups to the general public," the China Daily
said.
"Before 2002, only 10 per cent of all infections were caused by sexual
contact," it quoted Hao Yang, deputy director of the Ministry's Disease
Control Bureau, as saying.
The United Nations said in a report on Tuesday that China's drug-fuelled
epidemic had reached "alarming proportions".
"With HIV spreading gradually from most-at-risk populations to the
general population, the number of HIV infections in women is growing
too," it said of China.
The infection rate among pregnant women in provinces experiencing
serious epidemics, such as southwest Yunnan province, was about 1
percent -- the "clearest evidence" that the virus was spreading to the
general public, Hao said.
He said unsafe sex and drug abuse still posed a great danger because
measures to dissuade unsafe behaviour were not in place.
Health workers had found that only 38.7 percent of prostitutes insisted
on using condoms and about half the number of drug users still shared
needles, the Health Ministry said,
Mass human migrations and the rise in other sexually transmitted
diseases in China also aggravated the threat of an HIV epidemic, it said.
Up to the end of October, 12,464 people were officially known to have
died of AIDS in China, the ministry said. It has estimated that around
25,000 people died of AIDS in 2005 alone.
HIV/AIDS became a major problem for China in the 1990s when hundreds of
thousands of impoverished farmers became infected through botched
blood-selling schemes.
After initially being slow to acknowledge the threat, China has stepped
up the fight against HIV/AIDS in recent years, increasing spending on
prevention programmes and implementing anti-discrimination legislation.
This year, new recruits to the People's Liberation Army would be
required to undergo AIDS and drug tests, Hong Kong's Beijing-funded Wen
Wei Po newspaper said on Wednesday.