CHINA: With millions of migrant workers at risk, China's AIDS campaign has a clear target
- 00:00:24
- ITN Source
CHINA: With millions of migrant workers at risk, China's AIDS campaign has a clear target
: On the eve of World AIDS Day, construction workers at the building site of Beijing's CCTV tower put down tools and picked up condoms and brochures touting safe sex and HIV/AIDS prevention. In the first 10 months of 2006, the number of reported HIV/AIDS cases in China grew nearly 30 percent, according to the Health Ministry. For the country as a whole, reported cases now total 183,000, although UN experts and the health ministry estimate there about 650,000 people living with HIV/AIDS in China. With a country of 1.3 billion people, 12 million of which are migrant traveling from city to city, health experts are worried that AIDS pandemic in China might not be far away. Migrant workers are considered as the top high risk group of people. "Some of the constructions workers work in other cities for years and years. They all have sexual desires. When they are acquiring sex in inappropriate ways, there is a chance to get AIDS. They are likely to get not only AIDS, but other sexually transmitted disease as well. We want to educate them to raise awareness and reduce the risk." Wan Boyu, an official from Beijing Chaoyang District Disease Prevention and Control Centre, told Reuters during the rally. Liao Yongfu, a 24-year-old construction worker from Sichuan, has been working in Beijing for a year now. "Before, I knew nothing about AIDS. Now I know something, that is, I can't sleep around. This is the only thing I know." Liao is one of about 1 million migrant workers who have flocked to Beijing to earn more money on construction sites, as the capital scrambles to become a dynamic, modern city ahead of the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008. His building site colleagues hail from all over the country, often speaking unintelligible dialects. They all shared, however, an almost total ignorance of HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases -- until a district office organized an awareness rally at their building site. Tianjin Human-Care Latex Corporation is one of the two main factories in China that produce condoms for the government and hospitals. For one US dollar, the factory can produce 400 condoms. The massive production of condoms goes to poor migrant workers' hands and yet, it's not enough. Chinese media have reported sympathetically on villagers ostracized when their neighbors discovered they had the disease, which still carries a social stigma. AIDS was a taboo subject in China until recent years. The government's slowness to acknowledge the epidemic contributed to its spread, especially when millions of people sold blood to unsanitary clinics in the 1990s.
ITN Source | December 1, 2006
