Wu Zunyou, a top Aids official at the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said there was an alarming number of new HIV cases, predominantly among intravenous drug addicts and sex workers.

China does not have recent statistics on the total number of HIV cases in the country, but Mr Wu’s statements echo concerns expressed by officials in Beijing, including the health minister last month, and international health professionals.

Southern provinces and regions - including Yunnan, Xinjiang, Hunan, Guangxi and Guangdong - are the areas to have been most affected by the more recent spread of HIV infections, Mr Wu and other health officials said.

Up to the late 1990s, China’s main problem with HIV infections stemmed from the sale of contaminated blood in regions such as the inland province of Henan, one of China’s poorest. This had sparked regional epidemics, a problem Beijing says it has controlled. Mr Wu said the number of new infections from commercial blood sales had been “very small” since 1998.

A recent report by UNAids and the World Health Organisation warned that HIV is starting to spread beyond the high-risk groups of drug users and sex workers into the wider population. “It is the potential overlap between commercial sex and injecting drug use that is likely to become the main driver of China’s epidemic,” it said.

China has been trying to broaden its efforts to distribute condoms and set up needle exchange and methadone treatment programmes in the worse-affected areas. It is also trying to provide more free anti-retroviral drugs.

Beijing has also allocated record sums to contain the spread of HIV. The central government set aside Rmb800m for HIV-related work last year and is planning to nearly double this to about Rmb1.5bn for both this year and 2007, according to recent official media reports.

This is cache, read story here