BEIJING -- The spread of AIDS in central China's Henan Province, the country's worst-hit area, has been brought under initial control, says David Ho, a leading Chinese-American expert on AIDS and epidemics.

Delivering a lecture at Beijing's Qinghua University, Ho, director of the New York-based Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center, said the major cause of infection in Henan previously was blood selling among the poor, which had been similar to the situation in Africa.

"But blood selling has now been basically controlled in the region, and there is a small number of new cases of HIV/AIDS reported in the province, and most of the new cases were infected through sex," Ho said.

The incidence of HIV/AIDS is high in Yunnan Province and Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in southwest China, where the virus spread mainly through drug-taking, he warned.

Ho, a professor at the Rockefeller University in the United States, was giving a lecture on "Prevention and cure of AIDS, SARS and bird flu", after receiving an honorary doctorate from the prestigious university.

Ho invented the AIDS cocktail therapy in 1996 to control HIV and lengthen AIDS patients' lives by combining different drugs and antibiotics.

China had reported a total 144,089 HIV carriers by the end of last year, including 32,886 AIDS patients and 8,404 fatalities, according to China's Ministry of Health.

In the worst-hit areas like Henan, the death rate had dropped to 7.68 percent in 2005 from 15.42 percent in 2001.

The ministry is to include ten cities and counties severely affected by AIDS, including Weishi county and Zhecheng county in Henan Province, in its third national survey on causes of death, which began in June and covers more than one million people.