Gay sex continues to challenge China's AIDS control

AIDS experts told China.org.cn that risks from gay sex have remained the biggest challenge for China in curbing the deadly disease in the past decade.

Nearly 90.8 percent of newly reported HIV/AIDS patients in China in 2013 were infected through sexual contact. About 21.4 percent of all new cases resulted from same-sex contact, compared with 2.5 percent in 2006.

"Homosexual men often don't use condoms when performing sex acts, though we have been advocating this," said Wu Zunyou, director of the HIV/AIDS division of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

Bernhard Schwartlander, a representative from the World Health Organization (WHO), also noted the high infection rate among men who have sex with men (MSM) in China in July. "The HIV infection rates amongst MSM in China tripled from 2 percent in 2007 to about 7 percent today, and are as high as 20 percent in some cities."

For example, more than 93 percent of the newly discovered cases so far this year in Beijing were infections through sex, and more than 72 percent of those involved men having sex with men, according to statistics issued by the city's Health and Family Planning Commission. The proportion of newly discovered HIV cases in Beijing involving men having sex with men increased sharply, from 22.8 percent in 2006 to 72.7 percent by the end of June this year, the commission said.

Sun Jiangping, the deputy director of the National Center for AIDS/STD Control and Prevention, added, "The rising infection rate because of MSM is not just a serious matter in China, but also an international difficulty," he said, suggesting strengthening intervention, promoting condoms and increasing HIV testing."

Underground prostitutes are another major source for the spread of AIDS, but after intervention and educational measures, more and more prostitutes have started using condoms and the HIV positive rate has fallen from 8 percent in 2008 to 0.4 percent in 2013. At the same time, China has effectively curbed the growth of families with one spouse testing HIV positive and has kept the new infection rate below 2 percent.

The 2014 International AIDS Conference was held in Melbourne in July 2014, which advocated "stepping up the pace" in the anti-AIDS battle and "leaving no one behind," said Han Mengjie, assistant to the director of the National AIDS Affairs Office. A report from the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) indicated that 35 million people were living with AIDS/HIV by the end of 2013.

China, which has a population of over 1.3 billion, has an estimated 780,000 people living with HIV/AIDS. A total of 436,800 people were confirmed living with HIV or AIDS by the end of 2013, while 136,300 had died from the disease, 0.033 percent of China's total population, according to the statistics from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.