Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2005. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.

Reuters NewMedia - November 30, 2005
Benjamin Kang Lim

On the eve of World AIDS Day, Minister Gao Qiang said China aimed to keep the total of people infected by the HIV virus that causes AIDS to below 1.5 million by 2010. His forecast was sharply lower than the World Health Organization estimate of 10 million if nothing is done to prevent transmission.

"AIDS prevention work is an issue relating to the quality of the population, economic development, social stability and the rise or decline of the country," Gao told a news conference.

The central government was spending 800 million yuan on AIDS prevention this year, up from 100 million yuan in 2002, the minister said, adding that China was capable of effectively containing the spread of the virus.

The estimated number of Chinese infected with HIV through contaminated blood transfusions was 70,000, he said. China had cut the number of new cases by "striking hard" against illegal blood sales and closing down grassroots blood donation and collection stations, he said.

The number of confirmed HIV cases in China hit 135,630 at the end of September, a rise of 52 percent over a year before, but poor monitoring and official obstruction still obscured the true scale of the epidemic, top AIDS official Wang Longde said on Monday.

But China's vast size and dilapidated health system meant that only a fraction of HIV-positive people were officially diagnosed with the virus, and even fewer received medical treatment for full-blown AIDS.

Vice Premier Wu Yi said this week that the reported total of cases probably represented 16.1 percent of the real number -- which would give China an estimated 840,000 cases.

The U.N. Joint Programme on HIV/AIDS said that number could be anywhere between 430,000 and 1.5 million. Some international groups and Chinese AIDS activists put it in the millions.

Gao said his ministry had drafted a five-year AIDS prevention action plan which was now awaiting cabinet approval.

China's prevention measures included educating students at 90,000 high schools and 2,100 universities and farmers in 740,000 villages, the minister said.

Gao said the government would launch a campaign on Thursday to educate millions of migrant workers, peasants who flock to cities in search of higher-paying jobs. China has boosted official accountability and vowed to prosecute officials for cover-ups which lead to the spread of AIDS, Gao said.

About 2 million people, including drug users, had undergone tests, and about 40,000 tested positive, he said. He did not say over what period the tests were conducted.

China recorded its first outbreak of AIDS in 1989. Last year, between 21,000 and 75,000 Chinese died of AIDS, many of them poor, rural residents who died without treatment or even diagnosis, according to the United Nations.

During the 1990s, many Chinese -- especially in the central province of Henan -- contracted the virus through contaminated blood transfusions.

Cash-strapped peasants sold their blood to professional blood buyers, it was pooled, plasma extracted for medical use and the remainder returned to the donors in pooled batches, meaning that one infected person passed the diseases to others.

Now the means of infection have changed. Today, 40.8 percent of confirmed cases were infected through intravenous drug injections, 9 percent through sexual transmission, 23 percent through blood selling and 23.4 percent were of uncertain origin.

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(Additional reporting by Niu Shuping and Vivi Lin)

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