Aids now China’s deadliest infectious disease
HIV/Aids was for the first time the leading cause of death by infectious diseases last year, said officials in China.
About 7,000 people died from the disease in just the first nine months of 2008, said a report by the country's state media. At least one person died on average every hour in the first nine months of last year. The number of deaths caused by tuberculosis and rabies fell back into second and third place.
The HIV/Aids figures are dramatic increase - China's Ministry of Health says that until three years ago, fewer than 8,000 people altogether had died from HIV/Aids.
By last year, the total had risen to five times that many. It marks a dangerous new phase in the spread of HIV in China.
To start with, it was concentrated in high-risk populations, especially injecting drug users. Infection from contaminated blood transfusions was also common. But now the main cause of transmission is thought to be unsafe sex.
China has long denied that Aids was a problem, accounting in part for the low number of reported deaths. But leaders have shifted in recent years, confronting the disease more openly and promising anonymous testing, free treatment for the poor and a ban on discrimination against people with the virus. Nevertheless, many Chinese are still reluctant to be tested. The country is still very conservative but it is also going through a period of rapid social change. More freedom to move around the country means millions of migrant workers have left small communities for anonymous cities. Prostitution has increased. Premarital sex is also becoming more acceptable.
On Tuesday, the World Health Organisation warned of a steep rise in HIV amongst Asian men who have sex with men, unless prevention programmes targeting them were greatly improved.
While these figures in China are still unreliable, official reporting of cases seems to have improved. But there are still concerns that officials at local and provincial level are under-reporting.
China actually had an estimated 700,000 HIV/AIDS carriers in 2007, with an estimated 85,000 people infected that year, according to the ministry of health, said Agence France Presse news agency.
SOS Children has ten Children’s Villages in China, many of which incorporate health and social centres which help hundreds of vulnerable children and their families.
Written by Hayley Jarvis for SOS Children
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