World Bank - Aids expected to spread to economic centers

Aids in China has first emerged in rather distinct and poor provinces, but the disease will be hitting next the more afluent areas, said Peter Piot, executive director of UNAID this afternoon in Shanghai. Henan, Yunnan and Xinjiang have been hit in the past, because of both blood trade and drug use. Piot was now on his way to Guangdong province, the richest province in China, that was now number four in terms of HIV/AIDS victims.
Aids is now also acknowledged as a problem for national development and social stability and therefore an appropriate subject for the World Bank conference on poverty relieve.
The spread of patients to China's economic centers does not come as a surprise to him, said Piot. "Many carriers are migrants, entrepreneurial, often men without their families and outside their normal social structures. Also in terms of sex they are the risk takers."
Especially rural areas in China do not know enough about aids and how to prevent it, said Piot. He pointed out that the State Council only issued in April an order that threated local governments that would hide HIV or AIDS with heavy penalties. Piot: "Now we have to break the silence and need to talk about it."People in rural areas do not know how to prevent HIV so you journalists can prevent more contaminations than doctors can."
He encourage a strong leadership, that is essential to get things done. After the central government had taken the lead, he also encouraged the leaderhip on provincial and city level to show that leadership.
Reaction on an incident where a Beijing AIDS activist was stopped to meet a US delegation on its way to Henan, Piot said he could go wherever he wanted and talk to whoever he wanted. "Many countries have tensions between public security and publich health officials," he added. "Things are not perfect."
China has not an estimated 840,000 HIV/AIDS patients and the number is going up. "That might be a real increase or a better detection," Piot said. "I think in CHina it is a combination of both. Without real action China is expected to have 1o million HIV patients by 2010 and CHina's national goal is now to limit that to 1.5 million.

One of the reporters brought up the case of possibly illegal experiments on AIDS patients in CHina and according to an UNAIDS official this case will make it very soon to the courts.