This could be the reason why the official HIV figure has remained at 840,000 for the past two years, according to Bates Gill, a China expert at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"What I've heard is that with further modeling and more fine-tuning of their approaches, they now internally have come to the conclusion that the number may be actually lower than 840,000," he told a briefing in Beijing.

The new estimate, if it exists, has not been made public because of concern about the political impact of such an announcement, he said.

"Clearly the immediate reaction might be, 'Oh my God, they really are meddling with the numbers and they're trying to put forward a picture which is less serious than it actually is'," Gill said.

A Chinese health ministry official in charge of monitoring the spread of HIV confirmed Tuesday the figure was still 840,000, but said a new estimate would be released shortly.

"We're calculating a new figure. It will be issued by the end of this month," the official told AFP, declining to give his name.

The figure of 840,000 HIV-positive cases, as of the end of 2003, is regularly repeated by Chinese authorities.

It is an estimate arrived at using modeling techniques, and the result of a cooperative effort between China, the World Health Organization and the United Nations Program of HIV/AIDS.

The Chinese government has only directly diagnosed HIV in a total of 120,000 people, according to Gill, who regularly travels to China to meet with health ministry and other senior government officials.

"What I'm saying is that nine out of 10 people or so in China today, according to the government's own statistics, who are HIV positive don't know it," he said. "And the government doesn't know who they are or where they are."

Authorities in China only have a rough general sense of where HIV is prevalent, believing it to be more common among intravenous drug users and sex workers, according to Gill.

"That for me has obvious implications for the continued spread of this disease in China, regardless of what the precise number might be," he said.

The United Nations has warned that China may be on the brink of an AIDS epidemic, with 10 million HIV-positive people by the end of the decade.

According to official data, 45 percent of Chinese HIV carriers were infected through intravenous drug use and 25 percent through blood transfusions.

About 30 percent were infected through unsafe sex, and that figure has been rising steadily, prompting calls from health experts for 100-percent condom use programs throughout China.

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