With no advance warning, a team from the Health and Welfare Ministry has announced that a large-scale infection of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, is a far greater threat in this country than the public has been led to believe. After what seems like a long ministry silence on the issue, the team estimates that more than 15,000 people in Japan will be infected by the end of 2003, more than twice the officially estimated total of 7,320 HIV carriers at the end of 1998. The group also projects the number of patients with full-blown AIDS here will rise to about 3,300 over the same period, about 3.5 times the figure of 930 at the end of last year.

If health ministry bureaucrats themselves consider these latest estimates "alarming," as reports indicate, how is the public to react, lulled into dangerous complacency by what almost seems a government policy of silence on the continuing HIV-AIDS danger? The project numbers may indeed still be lower than comparable figures in the United States and Europe, but they represent a dramatic upsurge from a similar ministry prediction issued in 1995, which forecast only 5,500 HIV-infection cases in 1998 and 7,000 in 2000.

The registered number of Japanese reported to be HIV-positive last year was 1,598 but the health ministry team believes its estimate of 7,300 is closer to reality since many people who have not been tested are unaware of their infection and others only learn about their condition after considerable delay. While belated attempts to correct previous estimates are to be welcomed, they provide further ammunition for the many observers who believe the government consciously and deliberately underreports the true situation to avert a public panic.