China, India become focus of AIDS battle

The World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) have warned that India, China and Indonesia are in danger of seeing serious HIV outbreaks among their more than 2.5 billion people.

The warning will be among the issues to be discussed when some 20,000 top researchers, policymakers and activists gather in Bangkok this week.

They will be taking part in one of the biggest conferences in the 23-year history of AIDS, to assess the pandemic that is poised to ravage Eastern Europe as well as Asia's most populous countries.

"There are increasing warning signals that serious HIV outbreaks threaten in several countries (in Asia)," the two UN agencies said in their annual report, "AIDS Epidemic Update", released in November.

"Injecting drug use and sex work are so pervasive in some areas that even countries with currently low infection levels could see epidemics surge suddenly," the report said.

HIV prevalence in the region remains under one percent of the adult population, which may seem small compared to the AIDS-ravaged countries of southern Africa, where more than a quarter of adults aged 15-49 have the virus.

"That figure... can be deceptive," the report said. "Several countries in the (Asian) region are so large and populous that national aggregations can obscure serious epidemics in some provinces and states."