BEIJING, July 10 (AFP) - Premier Wen Jiabao warned that AIDS has spread to every level of Chinese society and that the world's most populous nation must make fighting the pandemic a top priority, reports said Saturday.
In comments published on the eve of the International AIDS conference in Bangkok, Wen echoed the alarm expressed by last week's UN AIDS report which said China could see 10 million infected with HIV within six years.
"These last few years AIDS has spread very quickly over a vast area, causing serious epidemics in some areas," said Wen, who was quoted by the People's Daily, the mouthpiece of the ruling Communist Party.
"The epidemic is currently spreading from high risk groups into the population at large," said Wen, who helped bring the once taboo issue of AIDS in China into the open when he shook hands with AIDS patients at a Beijing hospital last year in front of the cameras.
Wen said the biggest HIV problem was in China's vast countryside where a majority of the population lives.
He said the problem with the countryside was "the backward hygiene and medical conditions, and the fact the people are not well educated about legal and health issues which makes the task of prevention more difficult."
According to the UN's major AIDS report for 2004 released last week, China has "extremely serious" epidemics in parts of the country despite a low rate of the condition nationwide of about 0.1 percent.
The virus has spread to all provinces of China but with no distinct pattern of infection, the report said. In parts of central China, hundreds of thousands of poor farmers are estimated to have been infected with HIV from selling blood to supplement their incomes during the 1990s.
China currently has 840,000 people with HIV, according to the report. While the majority have been drug users, a surge of infections has also been recorded through the sex trade particularly in China's holiday getaways on the eastern and southern coasts and in its cities.
China last year launched a programme offering free medical help for the estimated 250,000 people infected by contaminated blood in central China, but to date only around 7,000 patients have benefitted from the treatment.
The government also significantly increased AIDS spending from 300 million US dollars in 2001 to 1.2 billion in 2003.
"Our government is the people's government and it needs to make the protection of the health of the population its top priority," said the prime minister.
Among the measures suggested by Wen for stepping up the battle against the pandemic was increased testing as, according to government figures, 90 percent of Chinese who are HIV positive do not know they are infected.
The six-day 15th International AIDS Conference, sponsored by the United Nations and non-governmental organisations, opens in Bangkok on Sunday. It will be the biggest AIDS conference ever held.
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