LONDON, Sept 10 (AFP) - China and India are at a crucial point in the fight against AIDS as the disease is poised to leap out of marginal infected groups and enter the mainstream population, experts said here Friday.
By the end of 2003, China had some 850,000 people living with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) or AIDS, Shao Yiming, chief expert at China's National Centre for AIDS/STD Control and Prevention, told a conference.
China's prevalence rate today is very small compared with its population of 1.2 billion, but the epidemic is so complex and fast-moving that "we are projecting that by 2010, there could be 10 million cases," he said.
"We are at a critical stage in which the epidemic could spread from high-risk groups to the general population," Shao warned.
The first cases of HIV in China surfaced in the late 1980s among injecting drug users in the southwestern province of Yunnan, an inflow for narcotics from the Golden Triangle region, he said.
In the mid-1990s, a major epidemic broke out in the central province of Henan, caused by tainted needles used in blood donations.
The Chinese news website sina.com on Friday reported that almost 10 percent of the 280,000 people who sold blood in Henan during this time were HIV positive, a figure that is nearly double the 14,500 previously reported by the province.
The epidemic is now flourishing along the bustling southern coast, driven by the mingling of prostitutes and migrant labourers, Shao said.
Looking to India -- with a billion people the world's most populous country after China -- US expert Thomas Quinn said "there is no doubt that the country faces a public health crisis."
Data about the epidemic is so sketchy or unreliable that "no-one really knows what the situation is," said Quinn, an 18-year veteran of AIDS in India who is also head of international AIDS and sexually-transmitted illnesses at the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
Various estimates, by Indian or international agencies, say India has between five to eight million infections, 60 percent of whom are co-infected with tuberculosis.
By 2010, that could be 20-25 million, according to a 2002 estimate by the US National Intelligence Council (NIC).
"India has at least 12 percent of the total of global infections. Every fourth newly-infected person in the world is an Indian," said Quinn.
Prostitution is India's biggest risk, for men become infected from sex workers, and go home and then infect their wives, who can then pass it on to their baby if they are pregnant.
Among prostitutes in Mumbai, "the infection rates have taken off... 60-70 percent of commercial sex workers there have HIV," he said.
Quinn said that, after years of denial, the authorities were at last giving a strong political push to combatting the epidemic but the country's pharmaceutical business -- the biggest producers of generic drugs in the world -- had still to play their part.
"Triomune is more expensive in India than in South Africa," he complained, referring to a three-in-one copycat anti-HIV drug, made by Cipla Laboratories, that South African AIDS activists say can be bought for as little as 150 dollars per person per year.
"It remains about 500 dollars a year in India, which is more than many patients can afford. It's almost as if they've taken South Africa and other places as markets where they can compete against the trade drugs."
The two-day conference was organised by the Royal Society of Medicine and the US National Institutes of Health.
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