Junguoda HIV/AIDS bilen yuqumlanghanlar sani 30% ge yiqin kopeygen

Junguoda HIV/AIDS bilen yuqumlanghanlar sani bu yilning deslepki 10
ay ichide otken bir yilgha nisbeten texminen 30% ge yiqin kopeygen
bolup, HIV/AIDS bilen yuqumlanghanlarning tizimliktiki sani 183,733
yetken.

Chinese HIV Cases Jump Nearly 30 Percent

NOV 22, 2006 6:30 AM EST

BEIJING (AP) -- Two months before the end of 2006, China's reported
number of HIV/AIDS cases already is nearly 30 percent higher than
for all of last year, with intravenous drug use as the biggest
source of infection, the Health Ministry said Wednesday.

The increase in reported cases indicates that China is doing "more
testing and more reporting and also that the epidemic continues to
grow in many parts of the country," said Joel Rehnstrom, coordinator
for the China office of UNAIDS, the United Nations' AIDS
organization.

After years of denying that AIDS was a problem, Chinese leaders have
dramatically shifted gears in recent years, promising anonymous
testing, free treatment for the poor and a ban on discrimination
against people with the virus.

President Hu Jintao signaled the new approach by appearing on
national television in late 2004 chatting and shaking hands with
AIDS patients.

Rehnstrom said reported HIV cases have been steadily increasing at a
rate of about 30 percent annually since 1999, but the real number of
HIV cases in China is likely four to five times the reported figure.

The United Nations said Tuesday in its annual report on the epidemic
that an estimated 39.5 million people are now living with the AIDS
virus worldwide as infection rates and deaths from the disease
continue to mount.

The reported number of cases in China grew to 183,733 by Oct. 31
this year, up about 28 percent from 144,089 at the end of last year,
the Health Ministry said in a report posted on its Web site. Of the
reported cases, 40,667 have developed into AIDS, it said.

"Each new HIV infection is a tragedy," Rehnstrom said. "The
government needs to focus its efforts on ... trying to stop the
spread of HIV and to trying to bring the spread of HIV under control
as soon as possible by controlling HIV transmission among injecting
drug users and sex workers."

He said government efforts to promote clean needles and methadone
treatments were beginning to have an effect but that those programs
needed to be expanded.

The official Xinhua News Agency reported Wednesday that government
health surveys show that only about 39 percent of Chinese sex
workers use condoms and about 51 percent of drug addicts still share
needles.

The report also quoted Hao Yang, deputy director of the Health
Ministry's Bureau of Disease Control, as saying that the rising
number of cases showed that "the danger of the disease spreading
further remains great."

The ministry said in its report that 37 percent of the cases
reported this year were linked to drug use and 28 percent were
caused by unsafe sex.

About 5 percent of the cases were caused by people selling blood
illegally or receiving infected blood from hospitals.

HIV gained a foothold in China largely due to unsanitary blood
plasma buying schemes and tainted transfusions in hospitals. China
has cracked down harshly on such schemes and declared last year that
the problem of tainted blood supplies was under control though new
cases still emerge sporadically, often in rural areas.

Transmission from mothers to babies was about 1 percent, the
ministry said. It did not say what caused the remaining infections.

Experts say China has hundreds of thousands people infected with HIV
who don't know it or choose not to report it. At the end of last
year, China and the U.N. estimated there were a total of 650,000 HIV
cases in the country, including those that were unreported.

The ministry said Wednesday there had been 4,060 AIDS deaths this
year as of Oct. 31, bringing the total number of reported deaths in
China due to the disease to 12,464 since it was identified there in
the mid-1990s.

http://ny.metro.us/metro/international/ap/China_AIDS.html