Christine Gorman, Simon Robinson and Bryan Walsh
In most countries a 30% increase in HIV/AIDS cases would be a cause for alarm. But in China—where new cases jumped by 183,733 year to year from Oct. 31, according to the Ministry of Health—it's a sign that the government is at least taking the deadly disease seriously.
For years Beijing insisted that HIV was a problem for other countries, and as recently as 2000 the government's official estimate of total AIDS cases was just 20,000. The reality: the number was far higher, thanks in part to a scandal in the country's Henan province that saw tens of thousands of peasants infected when they sold their blood using contaminated needles.
Today, an estimated 650,000 people are HIV-positive in China, according to the latest report by UNAIDS, though because of poor surveillance and a reluctance by HIV-positive Chinese to admit their disease, the true number is likely far higher.
Beijing has taken admirable steps to control the disease since 2003, when Premier Wen Jiabao was photographed shaking hands with an AIDS patient. Migrants, who could spread HIV nationwide as they travel thousands of miles from their home provinces to China's prosperous coastal cities, are eligible for free testing, and the government has begun offering free condoms in karaoke bars, while promoting needle exchange and methadone programs. (Intravenous drug use is still a major factor in the spread of the disease.)
The government is still wary of AIDS activists, occasionally locking up the more outspoken ones, but Beijing knows HIV is a serious problem—which may be more than you can say for China's neighbor India, where the government has failed to face up to the country's estimated 5.7 million HIV cases.
That's an important step for China. As we've seen in devastated countries like South Africa, official denial may be the single biggest factor in the spread of HIV.
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