ZONE:

The Chinese government has abruptly sent an AIDS control team to a village in Henan which was struck by mass infections of HIV from unregulated blood banks, reported Reuters quoting the People's Daily.

It was the first reported visit to the area despite a year of warnings from AIDS activists. State media in China state also published controversial reports earlier this year of HIV infection rates of up to 65% in Henan villages.

The paper reporter that the group, led by Deputy Minister of Health Yin Dakui, visited Wenlou village where his team carried out medical check-ups on some patients and visited clinics and homes of AIDS patients and people infected with HIV.

A clinic, using central and local government funds, had also been set up in Wenlou offering free medical treatment to AIDS patients or those infected with HIV.

Many in China are believed to have been infected by selling their blood to purchasing stations-some run by local government officials.

The brokers extracted plasma from pooled donations and then injected the remaining blood back into donors so that they could more quickly recover and make additional donations.

While the government insisted that there were 23,905 reported HIV/Aids cases at the end of March this year, the United Nations pegs the number at above 600,000 and says that by 2010 there will be more than 10 million who are HIV-positive.

The report also said that local and national officials had been keen to keep the situation secret. Henan officials have detained foreign journalists visiting the area while Chinese reporters have been warned not to do the story.

China has launched a drive to curb the spread of HIV through tainted blood transfusions amid warnings that an AIDS epidemic is reaching dangerous levels, state media said last week.