Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2006. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.

Reuters NewMedia - November 30, 2006

"This is a scary disease," said 22-year-old Mao Licai from China's western province of Sichuan.

"I think we should let more people know about it."

Mao is one of about 1 million migrant workers who have flocked to Beijing to earn more money on construction sites, as the capital scrambles to become a dynamic, modern city ahead of the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008.

His building site colleagues hail from all over the country, often speaking unintelligible dialects.

They all shared, however, an almost total ignorance of HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases -- until a district office organised an awareness rally at their building site.

"Some of the construction workers work in other cities for years and years. They all have sexual desires," Wan Boyu, an official from Beijing Chaoyang District Disease Prevention and Control Centre, told Reuters during the rally.

"When they are acquiring sex in inappropriate ways, there is a chance they will get AIDS. They are likely to get not only AIDS, but other sexually transmitted disease as well. We want to educate them to raise awareness and reduce the risk."

In the first 10 months of 2006, the number of reported HIV/AIDS cases in China grew nearly 30 percent, according to the Health Ministry.

For the country as a whole, reported cases now total 183,000, although UN experts and the health ministry estimate there about 650,000 people living with HIV/AIDS in China.

The ministry has said the virus seemed to be spreading from high-risk groups, such as prostitutes and drug users, to the general public.

Migrant workers, invariably single, poorly paid and from less progressive regions of China where sex education remains taboo, are immediately exposed to the high-risk groups.

Criticised for initially being slow to respond to evidence of a growing epidemic, China has ramped up grass-roots campaigns to take the fight against HIV/AIDS to the front lines.

The official Xinhua news agency on Thursday reported that 5,000 Beijing taxi drivers will hand out HIV/AIDS information leaflets to passengers in the first 10 days of December.

But non-state sponsored prevention efforts remain frustrated by a government wary of NGOs they cannot directly control.

Activist Wan Yanhai, director of Beijing Aizhixing Institute of Health Education, was forced to scrap a planned conference after being detained by police for four days.

At the government-sponsored rally, however, the warning about safety -- at least -- was clear for Liao Yongfu, 24, a worker from central Hunan province.

"Before I did not know anything, now I know a bit more," Liao, who is single, said. "I know that I can't go sleeping around any more. And that's about it really."

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