In a bid to halt the rising number of people suffering from
HIV/AIDS infections China is to launch a five-year scheme in 2007
to encourage the use of condoms among gays, said a senior official
from the Chinese Disease Prevention and Control Center
(CDC).??
"Prevention efforts among gays are key to the country's control
of AIDS,” said Wu Zunyou, director of the AIDS prevention bureau
affiliated to the CDC. “They need collaboration between government
departments and grassroots organizations.”
The target is to raise condom usage to 70 percent, said Wu. A
survey of 526 gays in Beijing indicated only 20 percent used
condoms all the time.
Gay sex contributed to 7.3 percent of reported HIV/AIDS cases
nationwide, according to the CDC. The main causes were drug users
sharing needles and unsafe sex.
In the first 10 months of the year 39,644 people were officially
reported to have been infected with HIV, the Ministry of Health
said last week. While a total of 183,733 people had been officially
reported to have contracted HIV the ministry estimated the actual
figure at the end of 2005 was around 650,000.
The ministry also estimates that at least 1 percent of the
country's 5-10 million sexually-active gay people in the 18-49 age
group have contracted HIV/AIDS.
Because of pressure within society many gays choose to marry
women. "This has led to the risk of them spreading the disease to
people around them," Wu said on Wednesday during an online
interview on www.sohu.com conducted in conjunction with today's
World AIDS Day.
Also, the CDC and the AIDS Intervention Center in Beijing's
Chaoyang District will jointly launch a project next year on
prevention through peer education among gays. The project will be
replicated in five cities every year.
It will record personal information such as age, profession,
feelings, health, condom usage and reaction towards discrimination.
Under the project free medical treatment will be provided to gays
with sexually transmitted diseases or infected with HIV and help
offered in finding jobs and fighting discrimination.
Starting this month the Chaoyang District intervention center
will offer free medical checks regularly to gays in Beijing which
is reportedly home to 300,000 gay people with 3 percent of them
infected with HIV.
To promote safe sex one of the country's leading condom-makers
has launched a custom-made condom for gays. Tao Ran, manager of
Gobon Condom Factory in Guilin, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, said that
the company would employ a special marketing strategy involving gay
volunteers and online sales to promote the product.
In addition to these efforts some AIDS experts see a more
tolerant society as a cornerstone for ensuring the mental and
physical health of gays. According to Zhang Beichuan, a professor
on AIDS studies at Qingdao University many free medical projects
are shunned by gays because of social discrimination.
"If the governments are more tolerant towards them the projects
will attract more gay people for medical treatment which in turn
will benefit the whole society," said Zhang. He proposed that legal
marriages be allowed among gays and a special law banning
discrimination enacted.
A recent survey conducted by Zhang, covering 2,000 gays in nine
cities, showed 60 percent of them suffer from the fact they are
gays and 10 percent were so badly affected they wanted to take
their own lives.
The reasons for contemplating suicide included broken
relationships with gay partners, social discrimination and unhappy
marriages to women.
(China Daily December 1, 2006)