Fridae

Wan Yanhai, a prominent heterosexual Chinese AIDS activist who was detained by Chinese authorities for four weeks in late August announced on October 17 that he has successfully registered his HIV/AIDS service organization as a nongovernmental agency with the Chinese government, reported Agence France-Presse.

Wan who allegedly posted state secrets about China's AIDS epidemic online, had been particularly active in publicising the plight of rural communities devastated by the virus after selling blood to unsanitary government-approved blood collectors during the 1980s and 1990s, which may have resulted in hundreds of thousands of HIV infections.

Registering the group, Beijing AIDS Action Health Education Institute, formerly known as the AiZhi (AIDS) Action Project (a non-governmental organisation he founded in 1994) with the government was an important step, because all unregistered organisations in China are deemed illegal and subject to government closure.

The group will work to implement HIV prevention and AIDS treatment programs throughout China.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan delivered a stern warning in a speech on October 15 at Zhejiang University in the eastern city of HangZhou, saying China stood on the brink of an explosive AIDS epidemic.

Chinese State television said Tuesday nearly one million Chinese had contracted HIV - the virus that causes AIDS - by the end of June 2002, revising an official estimate of 850,000 in April while the UN has estimated that as many as 1.5 million Chinese were infected with HIV by the end of 2001 and about 30,000 have died of it.

In an unusually frank assessment, a top Beijing health official warned last month that there could be 10 million Chinese HIV carriers by the end of the decade.

While most HIV patients in China to date are victims of unsanitary practices of paid blood collections or the sharing of tainted needles by intravenous drug abusers, sexually transmitted cases are increasing, they say.

A survey by China's State Family Planning Commission and the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in July 2002 said one in six Chinese people had never heard of AIDS and most who knew about it did not know the cause of the disease.

Last year, the government struck homosexuality from a list of psychiatric disorders and broke its long silence on AIDS which is a huge breakthrough for AIDS awareness and gays in China as Chinese society has long associated AIDS with homosexuality and drug use.