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Japanese Release AIDS Statistics
Wednesday,
5 February 2003
http://www.datalounge.com/datalounge/news/record.html?record=20514
TOKYO
- A total of 5,121 people in Japan have reportedly tested
positive for HIV through December of 2002, an increase of 139
from three months earlier, Japan's health authorities said in
a statement Friday.
Seventy-seven
of the new cases were transmitted via male-to-male sexual
contact, the Associated Press quotes Makoto Iwakura of the
Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare. Forty-five of the new
cases were contracted through heterosexual contact.
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Are
Japan's counts artifically low?
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There
were no reported cases of transmission through infected
needles in Japan, where drug use of that kind is relatively
rare.
Also
during the October-December period, 61 HIV-positive people
developed full blown AIDS, bringing Japan's total number of
AIDS patients to 2,549, Iwakura said. Four other patients died
from AIDS in the period, he added.
Critics
of the ministry's official AIDS tally say actual numbers of
Japanese with HIV are likely to be substantially higher, given
the pronounced social stigma in Japan still associated with
the disease.
The
ministry's committee on AIDS surveillance began meeting every
three months to compile statistics in 1984, when Japan's first
AIDS patient was diagnosed.
--
Editor
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