Story here.
The results of a survey of 1 million blood samples collected in Beijing between January and July this year revealed a high HIV infection rate among men who have sex with men in China’s capital city.
He Xiong, deputy director of the Beijing Center of Disease Control and Prevention, said that up to 5% of gay and bisexual men in Beijing are HIV-positive, compared to 0.5% of female sex workers.
Several reasons were suggested for the high rate among men who have sex with men. Some men who have sex with men lack knowledge of HIV, said He, and men who have sex with men reported using condoms in fewer than half of sex acts. And while gays have become more accepted in society in recent years, many still fear discrimination and so keep their sexual orientation secret. This makes men who have sex with men a particularly hard-to-reach target for HIV prevention efforts.
There are signs, however, that some other aspects of Beijing’s HIV prevention campaign are working. The percentage of infections due to mother-to-baby transmissions and infection via blood products as well as HIV cases due to needle sharing by injection-drug users had all declined.
While about 214,000 people in China are registered HIV patients, a 2005 survey by the Ministry of Health, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, and the World Health Organization estimated the actual number of patients at 650,000.
(That "men who have sex with men" is a mouthful. Sounds almost like a translation from another language. Maybe we should coin a word for that.)
2 comments:
To see it written here, it is confusing as to why they are saying "men having sex with men," as if to say that one or both partners do not consider themselves homosexual, which of course is the proper term for this kind of activity. Adding the word "Male" in front would of course imply that it does not refer to "woman on woman" action.
I don't think we need to coin anything here. Calling a spade a spade, it is clearly that rates are high among male homosexuals.
I was merely being facetious. :-)
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