China Urges Safer Sex in Rural Areas and Among Migrant Workers

Family planning associations throughout China will be asked to do a better job of teaching the rural and migrant population about safe sex to prevent HIV/AIDS, the state's China Daily said Wednesday. Most rural branches of the China Family Planning Association lack good education programs on reproductive health and disease prevention, CFPA Chair Jiang Chunyun said.

CFPA, boasting over 1 million branches and more than 80 million members, is a vast network throughout urban and rural China. Its primary task in the past has been to promote the country's family planning policy, which generally restricts urban couples to one child and rural couples to two if the first one is a girl. But with a rise in HIV/AIDS cases, family planning workers are now being asked to promote safe sex.

"People in rural areas, especially in the country's western regions, are lacking basic knowledge on contraception, AIDS prevention and family planning," Jiang said at a CFPA meeting Tuesday. "Meanwhile, tens of thousands of rural people are flowing into cities, most of whom concentrate in small and medium-sized non-state enterprises, where few family planning associations are set up," he said. Yang Kuifu, vice chair of the association, pledged that in the future, CFPA would strive to reach every household in every village and every work unit.

Experts estimate more than 8 million Chinese have STDs -- far larger than the official figure of 830,000 STD patients -- and that the figure is growing by almost 40 percent a year, the China Daily reported recently.

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