Free condoms and AIDS prevention leaflets have been distributed throughout the Olympic Village and hundreds of Beijing hotels in a bid to promote awareness of the disease, the city's health chief said yesterday.

More than 400,000 condoms and some 250,000 copies of the pamphlet have been placed in hotel rooms across the city, Jin Dapeng, head of the municipal health bureau, said at a press conference in Beijing entitled "The 29th Olympics and AIDS Prevention - the Flapping Red Ribbon".

A quarter of the condoms, 100,000, were allocated to the Olympic Village, he said.

Since their first Olympic appearance at the 1992 Winter Games in Albertville, France, free condoms have become a regular feature of the global sports event.

Jeroen Sluijter, a 33-year-old baseball player from the Netherlands, said yesterday it was good idea to issue condoms free of charge in the Olympic Village.

"You've got 16,000 athletes in the village and it's very likely some boys will like some girls, and there will be sex going on," he said.

"If there are free condoms around, people are more likely to use them," he said,

Also at yesterday's press conference, Wiwat Rojanapithayakorn, senior advisor to the World Health Organization (WHO) China, praised Beijing's campaign.

"The Chinese government has made significant efforts to promote AIDS awareness on a global scale and has staged many good campaigns.

"It is a practice that I hope will be followed by future Olympic host cities," Wiwat said in his speech yesterday.

As well as the WHO, several other international AIDS organizations attended yesterday's press conference, including the Joint UN Program on HIV/AIDS, UNICEF, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the International HIV/AIDS Alliance.

Jin said the distribution of the condoms and leaflets is part of a wider campaign to increase AIDS awareness during Olympic year.

In June, more than 10,000 Olympic volunteers attended training courses on the subject, he said.

"The campaign is part of Beijing's efforts to stage a people's Olympics, and to increase public awareness and reduce the incidence of AIDS in the capital," Jin, who is also head of BOCOG's medical support group, said.

About 700 volunteers in the capital have helped distribute leaflets, he said.

Beijing now has a comprehensive network, comprising 69 clinics and 128 laboratories, for reporting and monitoring HIV and AIDS in the city, Jin said.

In the first half of the year, 489 new cases of HIV/AIDS were reported in the city, down slightly on the same period last year, he said.

"Beijing still has a low incidence of HIV/AIDS cases, considering it has a population of nearly 18 million," Jin said.

Last year 1,190 new cases of HIV/AIDS were reported, up slightly on 2006, he said.

The main concern for health authorities, however, is that there have been a lot more new infections reported from among the general public, rather than just from the high-risk groups, he said.

"More than 43 percent of all new reported cases are attributed to people having unprotected sex," he said.

(China Daily August 16, 2008)