New cases of Chinese people with the AIDS virus grew by more than 40% in 1999, with women increasingly at risk, the newspaper of China's Health Ministry reported on March 29, 2000. Health experts detected 4677 new cases of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS and last year a 41.5% rise over 1998, the Health News said. It reported that China has recorded 17,316 Chinese carriers of HIV, 647 of them with full-blown AIDS, since the first case was reported in 1985. The number of reported cases is small by international standards, especially given China's population of 1.25 billion. India, with about 1 billion people, has an estimated 3.7 million people infected with the HIV virus. Chinese and foreign AIDS experts believe the actual number of Chinese that are infected with HIV may be closer to 400,000. Chinese health officials increased testing of high-risk groups last year by conducting more than 4.4 million tests, the Health News said. Women account for 15.4% of all HIV cases--¿an obvious increase¿, the newspaper said, without providing comparisons. The Health News quoted a vice chairman of the Association for the Prevention of AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Diseases, Dai Zhicheng, as calling the increase among women ¿a special warning¿. For much of the last 15 years, HIV has largely been confined to needle-sharing heroin addicts and their sexual partners. But in recent years, the disease has begun to show up among truck drivers and prostitutes in areas with thriving sex trades, foreshadowing an outbreak in the general population.