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China, India facing AIDS 'catastrophe': US expert

AFP, Singapore
The world's two most populous nations, China and India, are facing an AIDS "catastrophe", one of the United States' most senior experts on infectious diseases warned here Thursday.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director Julie Gerberding named Cambodia as another Asian country staring at disaster unless there were international efforts to help develop adequate public health measures.
Gerberding, on a tour of Asia to assess regional infectious diseases and give technical advice, praised Thailand's efforts to contain the HIV-AIDS epidemic.
"(But) in some countries, like Cambodia and China and India, the public health measures have yet to take hold," she told a forum at the American Chamber of Commerce.
"And the epidemic is really in that phase of scaling up very, very quickly. It looks like Africa did a decade or so ago.
"If we don't intervene in those environments we will have a catastrophe of a very, very profound increase in the number of cases."
She said cautioned countries against complacency in the battle against AIDS and other infectious diseases such as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).
"We are truly globalised and if one person in a country is vulnerable, every one is vulnerable. If one country is vulnerable then the world is vulnerable."
She said she was hopeful that China's experience in dealing with the SARS outbreak would help in the country's efforts to battle against the incurable Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS).
Gerberding's warnings are not new but they could refocus
regional attention on AIDS following unprecedented action in East Asia to contain this year's outbreak of SARS.
While SARS killed more than 800 people this year, US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Health and Science Jack Chow said up to 25 million people had died from AIDS worldwide over the past two decades.
Chow, who is travelling with Gerberding, warned there could be another 80 million cases of HIV-AIDS by the end of the decade in China, India, Russia, Ethiopia and Nigeria alone.
Chow warned of an "emerging AIDS tax" as the virus take its toll on the work forces and the economies of the affected countries.
The United Nations warned last year that China faced a "catastrophe (involving) unimaginable human suffering" unless authorities took urgent action.
According to UN estimates, between 800,000 and 1.5 million people in China had HIV by December 2001, and the number could reach 10 million by 2010.
Shared use of intravenous needles by drug use and infection through contaminated blood donations account for about three-quarters of current cases in China.
However, experience in other countries has shown the virus leaps out of narrow social categories and is quickly spread through sexual transmission.
This is especially the case in countries where prostitution and homosexual contacts are common but where repressive attitudes make it difficult to promote safesex practices.
India says four million people are living with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, more than any country apart from South Africa. A US study last year predicted there would be 20 million to 25 million Indians infected with HIV by 2010.