China officially reports nearly 40,000 new HIV

Beijing(China)—China’s Ministry of Health said Wednesday that the number of people officially reported as infected by HIV has risen 27.5 percent since the beginning of the year.
By the end of October, a total of 183,733 people have been officially reported to have contracted HIV, 39,644 more than at the end of 2005, the ministry said. “The rise in reported cases shows that more and more Chinese are being tested for HIV, and those who test positive are being reported through China’s recently improved case reporting system,” Joanna Brent, spokeswoman of the World Health Organization (WHO) in China, told Xinhua.
The updated figures show the number of officially reported AIDS patients rose to 40,667, an increase of 7,781 since the end of last year. The number of officially reported deaths from AIDS in the first 10 months of the year reached 4,060. The ministry said altogether 12,464 people had died from AIDS in China.
According to estimates by the ministry, the WHO and UNAIDS, China has about 650,000 people living with HIV/AIDS, including 75,000 who have developed AIDS. “The rise in reported figures of both HIV infections and AIDS patients indicates the situation in China is still serious and there is great danger the disease will spread further,” said Hao Yang, deputy director of the ministry’s Bureau of Disease Control.
He said 37 percent of HIV infections were caused by illegal drug users sharing contaminated needles and 28 percent caused by unprotected sex. He said transmission through unprotected sex was increasing, with the infection rate of sex workers rising from 0.02 percent in 1996 to 1 percent in 2005. Surveys show only 38.7 percent of sex workers use condoms and 50.8 percent of drug addicts still share needles. In Beijing, the health authorities have officially recorded 633 new HIV cases this year, bringing the capital’s total official number to 3,462.
About 39.2 percent of those infected by HIV/AIDS were drug addicts and 26.7 percent were sex workers, said Jin Dapeng, director of Beijing Municipal Health Bureau, on Monday. Beijing has set up six specialist clinics providing HIV carriers with medicines and treatment in its six districts. Needle exchange centers were established in most of Beijing’s urban districts and most hotels in the city provided free condoms. Hao noted that mass urbanization was the major reason for the spread of AIDS.

—The Daily Mail-China Daily news exchange item