China's new HIV/AIDS cases have accelerated to more than 3,000 a month, with the proportion of cases caused by sexual transmission increasing, state media said yesterday.
China recorded 3,223 new infections per month on average between January and last month, the official China Daily said yesterday, compared with 3,090 cases a month reported by Xinhua news agency for the first half of this year.
Nearly 38 percent of the cases reported in the first half were caused by sexual transmission, a rise from 30 percent last year, the paper quoted Wang Ning, deputy director of the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as saying.
AIDS had killed more than 3,000 people in China so far this year, it said.
China has become increasingly open about AIDS in recent years, facing up to an epidemic once stigmatized as a disease of the West.
As of the end of September, a total of about 220,000 people were reported to have contracted the HIV virus and a quarter of them had developed AIDS, Wang was quoted as saying.
The combined effect of the monsoon, the outer rim of Typhoon Fengshen and a low-pressure system is expected to bring significant rainfall this week to various parts of the nation, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. The heaviest rain is expected to occur today and tomorrow, with torrential rain expected in Keelung’s north coast, Yilan and the mountainous regions of Taipei and New Taipei City, the CWA said. Rivers could rise rapidly, and residents should stay away from riverbanks and avoid going to the mountains or engaging in water activities, it said. Scattered showers are expected today in central and
COOPERATION: Taiwan is aligning closely with US strategic objectives on various matters, including China’s rare earths restrictions, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Taiwan could deal with China’s tightened export controls on rare earth metals by turning to “urban mining,” a researcher said yesterday. Rare earth metals, which are used in semiconductors and other electronic components, could be recovered from industrial or electronic waste to reduce reliance on imports, National Cheng Kung University Department of Resources Engineering professor Lee Cheng-han (李政翰) said. Despite their name, rare earth elements are not actually rare — their abundance in the Earth’s crust is relatively high, but they are dispersed, making extraction and refining energy-intensive and environmentally damaging, he said, adding that many countries have opted to
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