At least 12,500 prostitutes in Dongguan of south China's Guangdong Province this year will be covered in an internationally financed HIV/AIDS prevention and intervention program being carried out across the country, a local official said.

No less than 12,500 prostitutes in the 32 towns and streets of Dongguan city will be targeted in the program, an anonymous official with the city's center for disease control and prevention (CDC) was quoted as saying by the Guangzhou Daily on Tuesday.

Seven towns -- Changping, Humen, Houjie, Chang'an, Fenggang, Dongcheng and Tangxia -- are designated to be the key intervention towns, which means 600 prostitutes in each town will be involved in the program, the official said.

The program will cover 300 to 500 prostitutes in each of the other towns.

"Since we are still drafting the working plan, it is inconvenient to reveal the detailed AIDS intervention measures or how the total number of the targeted prostitutes has been determined," a CDC press official, surnamed Xie, said on Tuesday.

The latest program in Dongguan is part of the Global Fund AIDS Program, a project launched in January that will last six years in 31 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities in China.

Dongguan, a manufacturing hub on the Pearl River Delta, has an underground sex industry that caters to the city's large immigrant population, according to local media reports.

Since the city detected its first AIDS case in 1991, until 2009, the number of HIV carriers and AIDS patients in Dongguan reached 2,000.

After joining the Global Fund AIDS Program, the city received $1.08 million from for the first stage of an HIV/AIDS prevention and control project being implemented in the city from 2010 to 2012, the Guangzhou Daily reported on May 13.

The first stage of the project aims to promote condom use among prostitutes to 85 percent and keep the infection rate of HIV within 1 percent by 2012.

According to the Guangdong Sexology Association's survey last year on the sexual habits of migrant workers, 30 percent of married male respondents visited prostitutes due to separation from their wives or unhappy marriages, while another 30 percent had multiple sexual partners.

The survey polled more than 3,000 migrant workers in Dongguan and Guangzhou, the provincial capital.

(China Daily May 19, 2010)