China has admitted for the first time that it is facing a "very serious" AIDS epidemic, with the number of registered HIV cases up by two thirds in the last year.
A senior health official yesterday said the total number of HIV-positive people in the country is now estimated to surpass 600,000.
However, the official number of registered HIV/AIDS cases is much lower, at only 26,058 by the end of June. This is a 67.4 per cent increase in the last year.
Statistics released at a special press briefing show that intravenous drug use is the leading cause of registered HIV/AIDS spread in the world's most populous country.
This is followed by sexual contact and the mother-infant transmission. People aged between 15 and 49 are most vulnerable to the attack of the AIDS virus.
In an unusually frank admission, the Vice Minister of Health, Mr Yin Dakui, said like many other countries in the world, "China is also faced with a very serious epidemic of HIV/AIDS".
The Director of the Department of Disease Control, Mr Sun Xinhua, told the news conference that one reason for the continued increase could be the blood infection scandal in Henan Province, where 65 per cent of people in one village are HIV positive after donating blood to illegal mobile blood banks.
China announced last month the establishment of a task force to investigate infections of people in the province from illegal mobile blood banks, and whether the blood banks have spread the infection to other parts of the country.
It also earmarked £10 million annually to curb the spread of AIDS.
The government has admitted that illegal plasma collection stations in some provinces had taken large volumes of plasma from peasants in the early 1990s without following government regulations and standard protocol.
Farmers sold blood for £5 per sample to buying stations, which pooled the donations in a large tub and extracted the valuable plasma. The mixed blood was then pumped back into the donors to prevent them from becoming anaemic.
Health Ministry experts maintain the phenomenon ceased around 1996.
The Vice Minister, Mr Yin, said yesterday health officials were struggling with a huge population and local officials largely ignorant of the causes and dangers of AIDS.
"The leaders and general public there do not fully realise the hidden dangers of a large scale epidemic of HIV/AIDS as well as the harm it may bring about to the local social development and general public in those places," Mr Yin said.
"They have not paid adequate attention to the issue."
Reuters adds:
The Swiss healthcare group Roche Holding AG sought to head off a fresh debate over the pricing of AIDS drugs in the developing world by insisting yesterday it was close to a cut-price deal with Brazil.
Stunned by Brazil's threat to break a patent on a drug Roche sells there and to make the medicine in a state factory at a fraction of the cost, Roche said an accord was within reach to cut its discounted Brazil price for Viracept even more in 2002.
"We were extremely surprised to hear the news... because we have been in a long-standing relationship with the Brazilian government, which has been particularly committed to active programmes to handle AIDS in Brazil," a Roche spokesman said.
Roche now sells Viracept, whose patent is held by US firm Pfizer Inc, at less than half the US wholesale price in Brazil and has offered a steeper discount in 2002, he said.