China urges
needle exchanges, free condoms in newly aggressive AIDS
strategy

As part of an aggressive new anti-AIDS push, China's Health Ministry is urging the promotion of free condoms and drug-needle exchanges--strategies previously considered taboo by the conservative Communist government. The "proposed guidelines for high-risk behavior intervention" urge local governments to tailor those measures to high-risk groups in what would be one of the boldest nationwide campaigns yet against the disease. The most striking proposal calls for combining methadone treatment with needle exchanges to promote safe behavior among drug users, a group almost completely ignored in the past. "Under the national health system's launching of a people's war against drugs, drug eradication, AIDS prevention, and daily tasks must be closely joined," said a copy of the guidelines posted on the Health Ministry's Web site. China launched a new national antidrugs campaign last month. Its newly aggressive approach on AIDS won praise Tuesday from Randall Tobias, the U.S. global AIDS coordinator. "I'm very encouraged by the commitment that the senior leadership of the government has made," Tobias said at a news conference in Beijing. He warned, however, of massive challenges still to be overcome in the Chinese countryside, where AIDS has often spread through unsanitary blood buying schemes. "It will be a very long journey," Tobias said. Washington is providing China with $35 million for AIDS work from 2004 to 2008. At the news conference Tobias and Chinese actor and anti-AIDS spokesman Pu Cunxin rolled up their sleeves and took a blood test to demonstrate the safety of AIDS testing for Chinese photographers. China says it has 840,000 people infected with the HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, and 80,000 have the full-blown disease. But health experts say the true figures are much higher and warn that China could have 10 million people infected by 2010 unless stronger measures are taken. The Communist government only recently became open about its AIDS epidemic after years of denying it was a problem, although independent activists are still frequently detained and harassed. Most victims are thought to have become infected through the sharing of needles during intravenous-drug use. Widespread prostitution is also a chief cause of infection, one that experts warn could spread the virus into the wider population. The guidelines say prostitutes should be encouraged to require customers to use condoms, seek reproductive health services, and be treated for venereal disease. People infected with sexually transmitted diseases are to be given free condoms, they say. They also call for disease prevention education to be carried out at places where gay men gather, along with work sites and other areas where migrant workers reside. (AP)