Explosion of AIDS Cases in Asia Alarms U.N. Health Agency

The estimated number of full-blown AIDS cases worldwide increased from 2.5 million to 4 million in the last 12 months--a rise of 60%, the World Health Organization said today.

Sub-Saharan Africa had the highest number of cases with 2.5 million, the U.N. health agency said. But Asia experienced an eight-fold increase of cases, from more than 30,000 to 250,000, it added.

“The global AIDS epidemic is now spreading in Asia faster than anywhere else in the world,” Dr. Michael Merson, head of WHO’s Global Program on AIDS, said in a statement.

Merson is attending an AIDS conference in Tokyo. A copy of his statement was released in advance in Geneva.

The WHO report said 16 million adults and 1 million children had been infected with the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, which causes AIDS, since the epidemic first took hold in the early 1980s.

WHO estimates that by the end of the century, between 30 million and 40 million people will have been infected with the virus.

All the statistics are cumulative totals since records were kept, dating to the early 1980s, so the HIV figures include people who have gone on to develop full-blown AIDS and those who have died.

It takes on average 10 years between infection with HIV and the onset of AIDS symptoms. The virus can be passed on through unprotected sex, contaminated blood, shared syringes and from mother to child.

Although the United States accounts for about 42% of the reported AIDS cases, it represents 10% of the overall estimated total. By contrast, Africa accounts for 33.5% of the reported cases but more than 67% of the estimated total, according to WHO figures.

Even though Africa now bears the heaviest toll, WHO is most concerned about the explosion in infections in more-populous Asia.

It said that in Thailand, HIV infection had spread from prostitutes and drug addicts into the general population.

The study said about 30% of intravenous drug users in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, were infected by late 1993, up from 2% in late 1992. In the northeast Indian town of Manipur, in the Thai capital of Bangkok and the Myanmar capital of Yangon, about 50% of drug addicts were infected, it said.

Merson said WHO was also concerned about China because of the increasing rate of sexually transmitted diseases in many parts of the country.

China, with its population of 1.2 billion people, has reported only 35 AIDS cases to WHO, but a high rate of sexually transmitted diseases, such as gonorrhea, is often a sign of the AIDS virus.