College Students to Promote HIV/AIDS Awareness in Rural Areas

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Tuesday, July 16, 2002

College Students to Promote HIV/AIDS Awareness in Rural Areas

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Care and Respect for AIDS Victims

In this summer, many Chinese farmers will have a chance to learn one thing that they may have never heard but could be existing and spreading among them.

The thing is called "ai zi bing" in Chinese, or AIDS, a deadly infectious disease which has claimed millions of lives.

But the farmers will know they can stay safe by taking some preventive measures taught by their teachers, a group of college students.

The students from medical schools throughout China will go to countryside of 10 provinces in the west and central part during the just-starting summer vacation.

They plan to give lectures, show videos or hand out pamphlets to rural residents. And the classroom can be anywhere: countryside fairs, transportation stations, or docks.

China's public health and education authorities now realize that college students can play a leading role in educating the public to prevent AIDS, which is silently spreading in the country with still-low public awareness.

Poor knowledge about AIDS in rural areas

Chinese experts estimate that the accumulated number of HIV infection cases stands at 850,000, among which between 80,000 and 100,000 people have developed into full-blown AIDS.

"Dominant number of HIV carriers and AIDS patients live in rural areas. But their knowledge about AIDS prevention and relevant laws are very insufficient," said Xiao Donglou, an official with the Ministry of Health.

He said people with little HIV/AIDS knowledge merely connect the disease with death and stigma, thus causing strong fear and discrimination against HIV/AIDS infected people.

The ministry's statistics show that sharing of injector needles among drug users caused 68 percent of confirmed HIV cases, while illegal plasma buying through unclean methods in the mid-1990s wasresponsible for 9.7 percent of HIV infections.

In the underdeveloped west of China, most HIV/AIDS people are drug users.

A five-year national plan on prevention and control of HIV/AIDShas decided to raise the proportion of urban residents who have necessary knowledge of AIDS prevention to 75 percent by the year 2005.

In rural areas, the proportion should be 45 percent by then, according to the plan.

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