This Thursday, Health Minister Chen Zhu announced that statistics show that 700,000 of China citizens will be either HIV-positive or living with full-blown AIDS by the end of 2007. Last year, China had a total of 650,000 cases oh HIV/AIDS infections. This figure actually dropped from the year 2004 when the estimated number of people infected with HIV was of about 840,000 to nearly one million.

But, this year, the infection cases got up again with almost 50,000 cases. The China Health Minister also announced that this year number of Chinese with AIDS is 85,000. These statistics were estimated in a joint report made by Beijing, the United Nations and the World Health Organization. In the number of the new infected Chinese, the higher part, nearly 45 percent came from heterosexual contact transmission and another high number, almost 42 percent, from intravenous drug administration and over 12 percent from homosexual activity.

The official report also stated that the number of HIV cases officially remained at 223,501, far lower than the estimated numbers above because of the people reluctance to seek testing in China. There are a lot of challenges regarding HIV/AIDS issue like better advocacy and education, improved treatment and care and discrimination reduction. For years, China leaders denied the AIDS as a problem, but recently, they confront more openly this disease promising anonymous testing and free treatment for the poor and banning the discrimination against HIV infected people.