BEIJING, Dec 11 (AFP) - 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, state media said Wednesday.
Most rural branches of the China Family Planning Association (CFPA) lacked good education programs on reproductive health and disease prevention, Jiang Chunyun, chairman of the Association, was quoted by China Daily as saying.
The CFPA, boasting over 1 million branches and more than 80 million members, is a vast network spread 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 having one child and rural couples to two if the first one is a girl.
But with a rise in HIV/AIDS cases in China, family planning workers are now being asked to also 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," Jiang said.
Yang Kuifu, vice chairman of the Association, pledged that in the future, the CFPA would strive to reach every household in every village and every work unit.
Chinese officials recently warned that the number of people in China infected by the HIV virus that causes AIDS could reach 10 million by 2010 if radical measures were not adopted soon.
They also acknowledged that there were currently an estimated one million carriers in the country, which has a population of 1.3 billion.
The United Nations has estimated there are about 1.5 million HIV carriers in China, and has urged China to take urgent action or risk an AIDS catastrophe.
In addition, experts estimate more than eight 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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