BEIJING, Dec 2 (AFP) - China will lift a ban on condom advertisements in an effort to promote safe sex and reduce the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases like AIDS, state press said Monday.
The ban is expected to be lifted early next year by the State Administration of Industry and Commerce which has for years waylaid a series of public awareness campaigns aimed at promoting safe sex, the China Daily said.
Regulations issued in 1989 by the administration banned the advertisements of all products related to sexual activity.
The announcement on ending the ban comes after the Chinese government marked World AIDS Day Sunday with its most public-ever acknowledgement of a growing domestic problem with the deadly disease.
Ranking officials 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 present 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 long complained of a lack of realistic Chinese statistics and an official attitude that has tended to ignore the disease.
Official Chinese figures at the end of 2001 showed just under 31,000 documented HIV carriers in the country, only 1,594 documented cases of AIDS and only 684 AIDS-related fatalities.
"The ban should have been lifted a long time ago because condoms are the most effective tools for not only avoiding pregnancy, but also protecting people and their partners from sexually transmitted disease," An Bohua, a state family planning official, told the newspaper.
The government's slow acknowledgement that condom advertisements would further promote China's "one child" family planning policy has also played a role in the lifting of the ban, the paper said.
Similar advertisements would also work to improve the quality of Chinese condoms of which up to 50 percent were found to be defective in a market survey taken in 2000, it said.
Condom use in China has reportedly grown due to an explosion of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), including AIDS, that is believed to be linked to an increase in prostitution, with the country having an estimated four million call girls.
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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