Talking about sex and AIDS, migrant worker Liu Shen, who works at a construction site in the suburbs of Kunming, the capital of southwest China's Yunnan Province, looks rather embarrassed.
"I have left my hometown for more than 10 years, and almost half of my workmates have had sex with prostitutes," the worker said in lowered voice during an interview. Liu Shen is not his real name
"Few of us know exactly how HIV/AIDS is spread," he said, noting that he and other migrant workers have few chances to read newspapers or surf the Internet.
Liu is one of over 100 million migrant workers who have left their hometowns behind to seek jobs in cities across China.
Migrant workers, most of whom are people between the ages of 15 and 49, are particularly vulnerable to HIV/AIDS due to their nomadic nature and lack of knowledge about the disease, said Lu Lin, director of the Yunnan disease control and prevention center.
As a major labor exporter, Yunnan is where China's first HIV cases were reported in 1989.
As of Oct. 31, a total of 93,567 HIV infections had been reported in the province, with the disease claiming 14,340 lives, according to statistics from the Yunnan AIDS Prevention Bureau.
The number of HIV infections contracted through sexual contact has been rising and sexual contact is now the main cause of the disease's proliferation, said Xu Heping, director of the bureau.
Of the province's infected population, 45.8 percent contracted the disease through sexual contact, while 37.3 percent contracted the disease through intravenous drug abuse, according to the bureau.
More than 10,000 new HIV infections were reported during the first 10 months of this year, the bureau said in a statement.
Sexually transmitted infections accounted for 77.3 percent of new infections during the January-October period, up from 71.3 percent during the same period last year, according to the bureau.
Xu said this year's new infections mainly occurred in people between the ages of 20 and 39, accounting for 60.8 percent of the total.
Infections among rural residents and unemployed people accounted for 55.3 percent and 18.6 percent, respectively, of this year's total, according to Xu.
"Preventing AIDS among migrant workers is a real challenge, as they give very little information about themselves during surveys," Lu said.
"There is a dire need to spread knowledge about HIV/AIDS among migrant workers," he said.
China launched an AIDS education program targeted at migrant workers in 2005 in order to help the workers avoid contracting the disease.
"The results have been far from satisfying," Lu said, adding that the managers of construction sites, where large numbers of young male migrant workers are frequently employed, are reluctant to discuss AIDS or hand out condoms.
In addition, Lu said migrant workers are generally reluctant to use condoms.
"It is particularly important to strengthen AIDS prevention among migrant workers. Yunnan is a typical case in China's HIV/AIDS epidemic," he said.
China currently has 346,000 registered HIV carriers and AIDS patients, although the actual number is predicted to hit 780,000 by the end of this year, according to an expert panel consisting of members of China's Ministry of Health (MOH)， the World Health Organization and UNAIDS.
