Wednesday • November 2, 2005
China
may be keeping new estimates for the number of HIV infections secret
because they are lower than previously published figures and could undermine
the government's credibility, a US researcher said.
This could be the reason why the official
HIV figure has remained at 840,000 for the past two years,
according to Bates Gill, a China expert at the Washington-based Center
for Strategic and International Studies.
"What I've heard is that with
further modeling and more fine-tuning of their approaches, they now
internally have come to the conclusion that the number may be actually
lower than 840,000," he told a briefing in Beijing.
The new estimate, if it exists, has not been made public because of
concern about the political impact of such an announcement, he said.
"Clearly the immediate reaction might be, 'Oh
my God, they really are meddling with the numbers and they're trying
to put forward a picture which is less serious than it actually is',"
Gill said.
A Chinese health ministry official in charge of monitoring the spread
of HIV confirmed Tuesday the figure was still 840,000, but said a new
estimate would be released shortly.
"We're calculating a new figure. It will be issued by the end
of this month," the official told AFP, declining to give his name.
The figure of 840,000 HIV-positive cases, as of the end of 2003, is
regularly repeated by Chinese authorities.
It is an estimate arrived at using modeling
techniques, and the result of a cooperative effort between China,
the World Health Organization and the United Nations Program of
HIV/AIDS.
The Chinese government has only directly diagnosed
HIV in a total of 120,000 people, according to Gill, who
regularly travels to China to meet with health ministry and other senior
government officials.
"What I'm saying is that nine out of 10 people or so in China
today, according to the government's own statistics
[интересное представление о статистике]
, who are HIV positive don't know it," he said. "And
the government doesn't know who they are or where they are."
Authorities in China only have a rough general sense of where HIV is
prevalent, believing it to be more common among intravenous drug users
and sex workers, according to Gill.
"That for me has obvious implications for the continued spread
of this disease in China, regardless of what
the precise number might be," he said.
The United Nations has warned that China may be on the brink of an
AIDS epidemic, with 10 million HIV-positive people by the end of the
decade.
According to official data, 45 percent of Chinese HIV carriers were
infected through intravenous drug use and 25 percent through blood transfusions.
About 30 percent were infected through unsafe sex, and that
figure has been rising steadily, prompting calls from health
experts for 100-percent condom use programs throughout China. — AFP
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