The number of new HIV/Aids cases in China is soaring, state media said on Wednesday, citing health officials, with rates of infections among college students and older men rising.
The Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention issued figures showing 48000 new cases in China in 2011, the official Xinhua news agency said.
Nearly 82% of those new cases were transmitted through sexual intercourse, Xinhua said, up from 11.6% between 1985 and 2005.
“The distribution of HIV/Aids cases in our country is now wider and more scattered than ever, posing great difficulties for prevention and control efforts,” Wu Zunyou, the director of the Centre, said according to Xinhua.
The centre said the number of HIV positive men aged 60 and above soared from 483 in 2005 to 3031 in 2010, or 8.9% of the total HIV cases in the country.
Stigma
That same age group accounted for 2546 of all Aids cases, or 11%. Infections among male college students, between the ages of 20 and 24, have also risen, it said.
The number of officially registered HIV carriers and Aids patients in China is expected to jump from 346000 to 780000 by the end of 2011 after the data is updated, Xinhua said.
China’s government was initially slow to acknowledge the problem of HIV/Aids in the 1990s and had sought to cover it up when hundreds of thousands of impoverished farmers in rural Henan province became infected through botched blood-selling schemes.
Beijing has since stepped up the fight, spending more on prevention programmes, launching schemes to give universal access to anti-retroviral drugs to contain the syndrome and introducing policies to curb discrimination.
But in a country where taboos surrounding sex remain strong and discussion of the topic is largely limited, people with HIV/Aids say they are often stigmatised. — Reuters
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