AIDS fight refocuses on gay men

Shanghai's health authority has vowed to test and treat more homosexuals for HIV after reporting that gay men made up the majority of new infections in the city this year, local media reported Sunday.

The Shanghai Municipal Commission of Health and Family Planning's report, which was released Saturday for World AIDS Day, shows that the male homosexual community remains a sticking point in the authority's fight against AIDS, even as the rate of new HIV infections tapers off.

The commission reported that about 96 percent of HIV infections this year were transmitted through unprotected sex, with infections of gay men accounting for 60 percent of the total, according to a report in the Shanghai Morning Post. HIV is the virus that causes AIDS.

The latter figure represents a sharp increase from four years ago. In 2009, gay men were the victims of 26.5 percent of sex-related HIV infections in Shanghai, the Xinhua News Agency reported.

At the same time, gay men make up a sliver of the people who get tested for HIV. More than 6,000 HIV tests have been given to gay men this year, accounting for less than 0.46 percent of the 1.31 million tests administered, the Shanghai Morning Post reported.

The city's health authorities have found 1,637 new cases of HIV in the city this year, about 10.7 percent of the total number of known cases, the report said. The commission said that the percentage has been falling since 2008, indicating that the virus has been spreading at a slower pace over the last five years.

Although the commission said it will pay closer attention to HIV infections in the male homosexual community, it did not elaborate on how it would get more gay men tested.

An HIV/AIDS support group, the Shanghai Youth Service Center of AIDS Prevention, which primarily consists of university students, has been seeking out at-risk individuals to persuade them to get tested. The center has set up a hotline, a QQ messenger group, a microblog and a WeChat account for people to contact them.

Conventional attitudes and a prejudice against people with HIV or AIDS have discouraged at-risk groups from getting tested, said Bu Jiaqing, a member of the group.

In another demographic shift, the 15-to-24-year-old age group has taken up a greater share of new HIV infections, said Shang Hong, an expert from the National Health and Family Planning Commission. The age group accounted for 1.7 percent of the people infected with HIV nationwide in 2012, up from 0.9 percent in 2008.