BEIJING, Dec 1, 2006 (AFP) - China will launch a five-year campaign next year to promote condom use among the country's millions of homosexuals amid data showing only one in five gays use them regularly, state media said Friday.

The project under the Chinese Disease Prevention and Control Center has set a target to raise condom usage to 70 percent, the China Daily said in a report marking World AIDS Day.

"Prevention efforts among gays will be key to to the country's AIDS control. They need collaboration between government departments and grassroots organizations," Wu Zunyou, director of the center's AIDS prevention bureau, was quoted as saying.

The newspaper said a recent survey showed that only 20 percent of Beijing's estimated 300,000 gays used condoms all the time during sex.

There are about five-10 million sexually active gay people in China, the report said. However, other reports in state media have put the number of gays in the tens of millions.

The report provided no details on how the campaign would be carried out.

Wu said the stigma of homosexuality in socially conservative China caused many gays to marry women to hide their preference.

"This has led to the risk of them spreading the disease to people around them," Wu said.

The government said recently that 183,733 people in China were confirmed to have HIV/AIDS at the end of October, 27.5 percent higher than at the end of 2005.

But the official tally of confirmed cases is far lower than the government's estimate released in January of 650,000 cases nationwide, and AIDS activists say the true figure could be as much as 10 times higher.

Gay sex contributed to 7.3 percent of reported infections nationwide, according to the disease center, the China Daily said.

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