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(Yicai Global) Nov. 23 -- China has made great strides to reduce the occurrence of the human immunodeficiency virus, more commonly known as HIV and the following disease called AIDS, found among its population. However, some 30 percent of the infected may not know about it.
Some 1.3 million Chinese people are diagnosed with HIV, which means that 9 out of 10,000 Chinese people have the autoimmune disease, data from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention show.
China's prevalence to acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) is at a low level compared with that of other countries, said Wang Bin, the deputy director of the national disease monitoring bureau. The prevention and monitoring work, the cost of which increases year by year, has achieved remarkable results, Wang added.
The infection has caused some 262,000 deaths while 85,000 patients have survived to live with the disease as of at the end of September, according to Wang. China is estimated to have 80,000 new cases each year while about 30 percent of people who carry the virus do not know about it and have not gotten tested.
Infections caused by blood transfusion have dropped to close to zero due to a widely adopted procedure of testing blood donors for the disease. This policy has been enforced after a village in central Henan province was caught in a blood transfusion-related HIV outbreak in the 1990s.
The network of AIDS treatment covered over 80 percent of the country last year, and the success of the medical aid was more than 90 percent, Wang said. The mother-to-child transmission rate of AIDS dropped to nearly 5 percent in 2017 from a bit over 7 percent in 2012, which was the lowest level in Chinese history.
World AIDS Day is held on Dec. 1.
Editor: Emmi Laine