According to a UNAIDS official China has taken significant steps to fight HIV and AIDS. Long-term challenges include reaching out to more patients across the vast nation and overcoming a lack of cooperation from some government officials.

According to a UNAIDS official China has taken significant steps to fight HIV and AIDS. Long-term challenges include reaching out to more patients across the vast nation and overcoming a lack of cooperation from some government officials.

According to the most recent government statistics, recorded in late 2005, an estimated 650,000 people in China have HIV.

"I believe that over the last few years there has been significant progress regarding positive results in the fight against AIDS in China. Now the challenge is to sustain these efforts," said Peter Piot, executive director of UNAIDS.

Piot noted that successes in China include commitment and transparency at the top levels of government, as well as proper funding, and the availability of antiretroviral drugs and outreach programs.

"I've been coming to China for 14, 15 years, and I can say in the first five or six years there was basically no receptivity in terms of the HIV issue," he explained. "And now today a lot is going on. You look at budgets, systems are being put in place; I think it's really very different."

Piot recently returned from Shangcai County in Henan Province, where unclean blood-buying businesses passed the virus to thousands of people in the 1990s. He toured a clinic and an orphanage for AIDS orphans. He also visited with patients.

"There was a 50 percent reduction in the number of AIDS related deaths in Henan between 2002 and last year," announced Wang Longde, China's Vice Minister of Health, who also spoke at the UN news conference.

Cases of transfusions using infected blood have fallen sharply since the 1990s. The government has banned the practice of buying blood and has forbidden donations by prostitutes, intravenous drug users and others in high HIV risk groups.

Piot noted that Chinese students need more intensive sex education.

"In some schools, teachers just give students booklets and they think their job is done," he said.

Wang commented that young people are more willing to accept or practice new concepts, ideas and even risky behavior, thus they were more vulnerable to HIV/AIDS.

"Sexual transmission accounts for 91 percent of all HIV/AIDS cases known in China," said Wang. He cited a medical college student who wrote to the central government to express his fear of getting HIV after having sex with men. The student later turned out to be uninfected.

"Regarding newly diagnosed HIV carriers in 2006, almost 80 percent were age 20 to 39," stated Wang.

(Shanghai Daily July 18, 2007)