The spread of AIDS in central China's Henan Province, the
country's worst-hit area, has been brought under initial control,
says David Ho, a leading Chinese-American expert on AIDS and
epidemics.
Delivering a lecture at Beijing's Qinghua University, Ho,
director of the New York-based Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center,
said the major cause of infection in Henan previously was blood
selling among the poor, which had been similar to the situation in
Africa.
"But blood selling has now been basically controlled in the
region, and there is a small number of new cases of HIV/AIDS
reported in the province, and most of the new cases were infected
through sex," Ho said.
The incidence of HIV/AIDS is high in Yunnan Province and Guangxi
Zhuang Autonomous Region in southwest China, where the virus spread
mainly through drug-taking, he warned.
Ho, a professor at the Rockefeller University in the United
States, was giving a lecture on "Prevention and cure of AIDS, SARS
and bird flu", after receiving an honorary doctorate from the
prestigious university.
Ho invented the AIDS cocktail therapy in 1996 to control HIV and
lengthen AIDS patients' lives by combining different drugs and
antibiotics.
China had reported a total 144,089 HIV carriers by the end of
last year, including 32,886 AIDS patients and 8,404 fatalities,
according to China's Ministry of Health.
In the worst-hit areas like Henan, the death rate had dropped to
7.68 percent in 2005 from 15.42 percent in 2001.
The ministry is to include ten cities and counties severely
affected by AIDS, including Weishi county and Zhecheng county in
Henan Province, in its third national survey on causes of death,
which began in June and covers more than one million people.
(Xinhua News Agency September 21, 2006)