The number of people in China living with HIV/AIDS grew 14 percent in the past year, according to an Al Jazeera report based on China’s state news agency, Xinhua. This amounts to nearly 100,000 new diagnoses.
What’s more, most of the cases were a result of sexual transmission rather than blood transfusions. In the 1990s, China made national headlines when tens of thousands of people—even entire villages—contracted the virus via tainted blood.
According to the report, at the end of June 2018, more than 820,000 people were living with HIV or AIDS in China. That’s an increase of 100,000 from June 2017.
Of the more than 40,000 new diagnoses reported in the second quarter, 93 percent were attributed to sexual transmission.
A BBC article notes that the country’s LGBT community has been hit especially hard. Although homosexuality was decriminalized in China in 1997, discrimination leads as much as 90 percent of men who have sex with men to marry women.
To address the growing threat of HIV, the Chinese government began providing universal access to treatment in 2003.