ABSTRACT
In East Asia, it was only in the early twenty-first century that responses to the HIV/AIDS epidemic came to be considered on a regional basis, although individual countries had started to address the issue much earlier. The explosion of HIV infection in Asia started in South East Asia around 1990 and extended to other parts of Asia. The Chinese Ministry of Health, UNAIDS and WHO estimate that 700,000 people are infected with HIV in the whole of China. In South Korea the first case of HIV/AIDS was reported in 1985; numbers have increased since then, with drastic increases from 2000. In Hong Kong the reported cases of HIV/AIDS are increasing every year and the accumulated cases at the end of June 2008 were 3,822 cases of HIV infection and 966 cases of AIDS. The main characteristic of the HIV/AIDS issue in East Asia is the relatively low HIV infection rate, as a percentage of the admittedly large population.
