BEIJING, Dec 11 (AFP) - China has responded to the drastic shortage of professional treatment for AIDS sufferers by building its first dedicated medical center, state media said Thursday.
The center -- reminiscent of dedicated hospitals set up during the SARS outbreak earlier this year -- will be established in southwest China's Yunnan province, which has seen a sharp rise in HIV/AIDS.
It will be built near Yunnan's capital Kunming city and have 200 beds, the official Xinhua news agency said. It will be a base for counselling, education and medical research.
Like other places in China, Yunnan has too few facilities to treat HIV/AIDS patients and too few qualified doctors to administer the complicated drugs treatments.
Ordinary hospitals lack the capacity to treat AIDS sufferers and some hospitals, particularly in the countryside, have turned away AIDS patients because of a lack of expertise.
Yunnan is one of the worst hit provinces in China, despite the national focus being on central China where an outbreak was caused by farmers selling blood in unsanitary government-approved schemes.
Most HIV/AIDS sufferers in Yunnan are drug users but it is spreading to other sectors. Previously 60 to 70 percent of HIV/AIDS patients in Yunnan were drug users who became infected from sharing needles, but this year the percentage has dropped to 47.5 percent as transmission through sex increased to 21.9 percent of cases, Xinhua said.
The spread of HIV/AIDS from the high-risk population to the mainstream has caused alarm and prompted calls to government to take stronger action.
The government estimates there are more than 80,000 cases in Yunnan this year and about 840,000 cases nationwide, but the United Nations believe the figures are grossly underestimated.
It believes there are at least one million cases in China, with the epidemic threatening to spread to 20 million people by 2010.
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