AIDS revealed as Hunan’s most fatal infectious disease over last 20 years

An official report published on Friday stated that AIDS was Hunan's leading cause of death among infectious diseases in the past 20 years.

Hunan Provincial Department of Public Health Friday issued a report on the situation, saying that there are a total of 18,430 cases of AIDS or HIV in the province. They also said that there were 5,482 deaths between 1992 and the end of July this year, the seventh most in China.

Hengyang , Yongzhou, Changsha, Huaihua and Shaoyang were ranked the top five cities in terms of the number of HIV patients.

The ratio of male patients to female ones in Hunan is 2.3 to 1 and 43.32 percent of the patients are farmers, according to the report.

A majority of the patients aged above 50 were infected through heterosexual activity whereas 70 percent of the student patients, those aged between 15 and 24, were infected through homosexual activity.

Though it takes five to ten years for HIV carriers to be infected with AIDS, 42 percent of patients failed to detect the disease by taking a test and died once they were diagnosed with AIDS, said Chen Xi, an authority in the center for disease control and prevention in Hunan on Saturday.