AIDS experts: 'Mobile men with money' risky
By Luo Man (China Daily)
Updated: 2005-08-02 06:15

The groups traditionally identified as vulnerable in China - migrants and prostitutes as well as poor people who donate blood in exchange for money - all have programmes in place to help curb the spread of the disease.

Fears the floating population of migrant workers might be the biggest threat to China's cities first started to surface about a year and a half ago. There is therefore a lot of work being done to control the spread among this group and much of it is working,

But more affluent groups may be beyond the reach of such programmes. They are rarely tested and, in all the literature available, they are seldom mentioned.

"The data never analyses this. I think it's a problem," said Pan. "I think we should look at this question."

Awareness of HIV/AIDS in China is growing, if slowly, and the number of programmes to help people living with the disease is growing every day. At the same time, prevention efforts have gone a long way to largely keeping the virus out of urban centres.

Since the first case of HIV was uncovered in China in 1985, the virus has spread to every province. Still, in big cities like Shanghai, the reported numbers have been relatively small.

In Shanghai, since the virus was first detected in 1987 up until 2004, there have been 1,150 officially detected cases. Given a population that tops 12 million, the incidence is less than 0.01 per cent.

That's the number of known cases. But UNAIDS studies have shown about 90 per cent of those infected in China are unaware.

Most of these affected people are migrants or prostitutes, but programmes already in place to control the epidemic among these groups are already having some effect. That leaves another open question.