In the next few years, heterosexual contact will become the major source of infection for Aids in China, endangering the general population not just high-risk groups.
Up to now, intravenous drug use is still the major transmission channel, while unsanitary blood selling from the mid-1980s to 1990s has affected farming regions in central China. But with the increase in promiscuity and widespread prostitution, heterosexual contact will replace drug injection as the major cause of HIV and Aids infections.
So far, most victims of the epidemic in China have been drug addicts, farmers who sold blood, people receiving transfusion from tainted blood and prostitutes.
International Aids experts have warned that the disease can spread to the mainstream population unless China takes urgent measures to stop the spread.
China now has 840,000 HIV and Aids cases and is still in the low prevalence level. But high prevalence clusters continue to increase at a rapid rate among high risk groups like drug users and prostitutes who exist in various forms in China and most of them do not use condoms and have high-risk behaviour.
Meanwhile, many homosexual and bisexual men have set up families with a female, which poses another threat to women and also to babies who will be infected through their mothers. Infection through blood transfusions has been basically curbed in China and will not pose a high risk for Aids spread.
But in some rural areas, irresponsible or ill-informed doctors in recent years have still used unchecked blood they buy from farmers for transfusions rather than blood from blood banks, which costs more.
International organisations, including the United Nations, believe China's official figure for the number of infections is far too low, suggesting it could rise to 20 million by 2010.
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