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The Beijing Municipal Commission of Health and Family Planning released the annual data report on HIV and AIDS cases on Dec 1 and announced that although Beijing has fewer new cases, there are peculiarities that make fighting the virus difficult.
A total of 3,135 new HIV cases were reported in the first 10 months of this year, down 1.45 percent year on year, bringing the total number of infections to 21,886, including 4,954 local Beijingers and 16,932 non-locals.
The statistics showed that intravenous drug abuse infections remained at a low level this year. None of the more than 2,000 heroin users tracked in Beijing from 2013 to 2015 had new infections.
However, the report suggested that up to 96.9 percent of the new cases were sexually transmitted, 9.8 percentage points higher than in 2011. Male to male sexually transmitted infections have risen since 2013, a clear upward trend in the proportion of infections and reached 5 percent of the total infection rate.
In addition, considering the features of the floating population, the proportion of non-local infections were especially prominent.
Perhaps the most noteworthy statistics surrounded the infection rates of young people and students in Beijing. Within the 15 to 24-year-old demographic, there were a total of 647 young people living with HIV or AIDS in 2016, a rise of 3.7 percent compared to the previous year. Of those, 88 were students when they contracted the infection. Among the infected students, 95.5 percent contracted HIV sexually and 88.6 percent specifically contracted HIV through male to male sex.
AIDS-related deaths of patients receiving anti-virus treatment has decreased to 0.18 percent, far lower than the national average level of over 2 percent.
According to the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of people living with HIV/AIDS in China hit 654,000 by the end of September, with recorded 201,000 deaths since records were first kept in 1985.
