BEIJING, Nov 13 (AFP) - China needs to take urgent action to halt the spread of AIDS or risk 10 million more people becoming infected over the next decade, the head of the United Nations AIDS programme told a pioneering conference on Tuesday.
"I said that this conference is of global significance, and the reason is simply this: over the next two decades, what happens in China will determine the global burden of HIV/AIDS," said Peter Piot, executive director of UNAIDS.
Piot, who was addressing experts and officials meeting in the Chinese capital for the country's first-ever national conference on the subject, praised authorities for having made some progress.
If adequate measures were taken "over the coming decade, as many as 10 million HIV infections can be averted in China", said Piot.
But, he cautioned, "if there is no change to the intensity of the response to AIDS, then the epidemic will inevitably grow".
China's Health Minister Zhang Wenkang told the three-day conference, which opened on Tuesday, that the number of reported HIV/AIDS infections in the first half of the year grew 67.4 percent over the same period last year.
The number of HIV positive people in China "now exceeds 600,000", he said.
However outside experts say the official figure is a massive understatement.
According to some independent doctors, more than a million people are HIV positive in just the central province of Henan, which was particularly badly affected by roaming commercial blood collectors between the end of the 1980s and mid-1990s.
Many poor rural dwellers repeatedly sold blood to the blood collectors, who used grossly unsanitary methods, blamed for a large part of China's AIDS explosion.
In parts of Henan, the disease has cut a swathe through entire villages, decimating the communities, many of which complain they have received little government help.
However, Dai Zhicheng, an official from China's centre for infectious diseases, told the conference "30,000 to 50,000 people, and certainly not more than 100,000" had contracted the disease through selling their blood.
Despite the quibbling over figures, the fact the meeting is taking place indicates how far China has come in acknowledging it faces a grave crisis.
"The conference is a major step in the right direction," said Charles Rycroft, spokesman for the United Nations children's fund UNICEF in Beijing, speaking before the conference opened.
In past years, Chinese authorities viewed AIDS as something associated with social undesirables such as drug users and homosexuals and thus undeserving of much attention.
Measures are even being taken to tackle prejudice against AIDS patients, still routinely treated as pariahs.
On Tuesday evening a number of Chinese pop music and showbusiness stars attended an event on the fringes of the conference to promote an end to ignorance about the disease.
Nonetheless few doubt the government has made mistakes in dealing with the epidemic.
"More could have been done in the past," said UNICEF representative in China Edwin Judd, noting the sole organisation to launch an anti-AIDS campaign before now was the All China Federation of Women, although a majority of sufferers are men.
Charles Mycroft said while action was being done to tackle contaminated blood, another major cause of the disease -- intravenous drug use -- was being neglected by authorities.
"They don't want to work with people who use drugs because they don't want to give the impression that they are too permissive," he said.
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