China to build special prisons for AIDS convicts

China’s booming southern province of Guangdong is to build at least two prisons exclusively for HIV/AIDS-infected convicts to try to halt the disease’s spread, state media reported on Monday.

There were currently 20 AIDS sufferers and 518 HIV carriers serving jail terms in Guangdong, the China Daily said, adding that many provincial officials had urged the government to build the hospitals as soon as possible.

“Since the fatal virus is able to spread quickly in such an environment (prisons)... the number of AIDS-carrying inmates would be sure to increase, posing further problems for the management,” the newspaper quoted one official as saying.

China says it has 840,000 HIV-AIDS cases among its 1.3 billion population, but experts say at least a million poor farmers were infected in botched blood-selling schemes in the 1990s in the central province of Henan alone.

A top Chinese HIV expert recently echoed a grim U.N. warning that the number of HIV-AIDS cases could reach 10 million in China by 2010 if no effective measures are taken to curb the disease.

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