LONDON (AFP) - China and India are at a crucial point in the fight against AIDS (news - web sites) as the disease is poised to leap out of marginal infected groups and enter the mainstream population, experts said.

By the end of 2003, China had some 850,000 people living with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV (news - web sites)) or AIDS, Shao Yiming, chief expert at China's National Centre for AIDS/STD Control and Prevention, told a conference.

China's prevalence rate today is very small compared with its population of 1.2 billion, but the epidemic is so complex and fast-moving that "we are projecting that by 2010, there could be 10 million cases," he said.

"We are at a critical stage in which the epidemic could spread from high-risk groups to the general population," Shao warned.

The first cases of HIV in China surfaced in the late 1980s among injecting drug users in the southwestern province of Yunnan, an inflow for narcotics from the Golden Triangle region, he said.