China’s AIDS Fight Misses Drug Users, Sex Cases, Study Finds

Drug users and those infected with HIV through sex in China are more than twice as likely to die than those who got the virus from a blood transfusion, according to the nation’s first report on the death toll from AIDS.

Among those infected by blood transfusion, there were 6.7 deaths in every 100 people, compared with 15.9 deaths for injecting drug users and 17.5 for those infected through sex, researchers from the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention wrote in the medical journal The Lancet today. Deaths in China fell by almost two-thirds between 2002 and 2009 as the number of patients receiving treatment jumped, they found.