China facing 'explosive' AIDS epidemic, U.N. study claims

BEIJING -- China is on the brink of an "explosive" AIDS epidemic and could have 10 million infected people by the end of the decade, according to a U.N. study released Thursday.

The report urged the Chinese government to spend more on education and prevention, and complained that many Chinese officials lack commitment to fighting AIDS. Talking more openly about the disease will help to remove its stigma and make people willing to come forward for testing and treatment, it said.

"The virus is still spreading, and we need to marshal all our resources in a very different way if we want to stop it," Kerstin Leitner, the United Nations resident coordinator in China, told reporters.

China reported its first AIDS case in 1985.

Now the country is "on the verge of a catastrophe that could result in unimaginable suffering, economic loss and social devastation," said the 89-page report, "HIV/AIDS: China's Titanic Peril."

Numbers studied

It said data collected last year showed 30,736 people were infected with the HIV virus, 1,594 had full-blown AIDS and 684 people had died from illnesses related to the disease.

But, it said, the true number of people carrying the AIDS virus was far higher, between 800,000 and 1.5 million -- most of them infected through intravenous drug use or poor sanitation in China's blood-buying industry. That figure could soar to 10 million by 2010, said Siri Tellier, chairwoman of the U.N. Theme Group on HIV/AIDS in China, which prepared the report.

The study warned that sexual intercourse -- both heterosexual and homosexual -- is fast growing as a means of infection.

"All indications point to the brink of explosive HIV/AIDS epidemics in increasing numbers of areas and populations, with an imminent risk to the widespread dissemination of HIV to the general population through sexual transmission," it said.

In April, state media reported that intravenous drug use accounted for 68 percent of infections, while blood-selling accounted for 9.7 percent.

That was the most specific official estimate yet of people infected by China's blood-buying industry, blamed for spreading the virus to thousands of poor, rural villagers.

Unsafe blood buying

Collectors bought blood from villagers, pooled it and extracted plasma -- the liquid part of the blood sought for medical uses. They then reinjected the blood back into the sellers, apparently to limit their blood loss.

Though the government has set up safe blood banks and held a first-ever AIDS conference last year, the report indicated efforts still fall short of effective prevention.

Activists who have tried to raise a public alarm about the disease have been harassed by local officials who are reluctant to admit that their areas have a sex or drug trade.

Lack of knowledge makes China vulnerable to the disease, the report said.

Many people still think HIV can be contracted through mosquito bites or shaking hands. Other problems include poverty and lack of access to condoms.

The sheer size of the country makes education and treatment difficult.

"What is so much harder is how you get to this vast number of villages that you need to get to. That is the real challenge," Leitner said. "It's not that people are dumb or they don't want to hear about it. It's the scale that is so scary sometimes."

Dr. Emile Fox, the adviser in China for UNAIDS, the United Nations' AIDS-fighting agency, said the virus spreads differently in different regions, forcing health authorities to create individual strategies for controlling it.

"It's not one small homogenous community where you could have an increase that goes in a certain way," Fox said.

HIV trends in China are estimated through tests administered at national and provincial levels on vulnerable population groups, such as prostitutes, drug-users, pregnant women and people with sexually transmitted infections, the study said.