China, India and Cambodia could face an AIDS "catastrophe" as the HIV virus spreads deeper into parts of Asia where health controls are weak, the U.S.-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Thursday.
"It looks like Africa did a decade or so ago," she told a briefing in Singapore.
China, the world's most populous nation, estimates that around one million of its people suffer from HIV, the virus which causes AIDS, a figure the United Nations says could soar to 10 million by the end of the decade.
India, with the world's second-biggest population, has at least four million sufferers. In Cambodia, an estimated 158,000 people, or 2.6 percent of adults in the war-scarred nation, are HIV positive.
"If we don't intervene in those environments we will have a catastrophe of a very, very profound increase in the number of cases," said Gerberding of the CDC, a federal health agency overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services.
The CDC director is meeting Asian health officials to discuss technical support in detecting emerging infectious disease in the aftermath of deadly outbreaks of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome in China, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong.
United Nations agency UNAIDS says 42 million people are infected with HIV worldwide -- 29.4 million of them in Africa. It has killed 25 million worldwide.
The United Nations forecasts that by 2010, 45 million more will be infected if the pandemic continues at its current pace and 70 million will have died by 2020.
