Up to now, drug users, gay men, prostitutes and the victims of irresponsible blood-buying schemes in the 1990s have been most exposed to contracting the AIDS virus in China.

According to the Ministry of Health, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and the World Health Organization (WHO), by the end of 2007, in China there were approximately 700,000 people living with HIV/AIDS, which means an estimated 0.05 percent of the country’s total population.

"The epidemic is lowly prevalent in general but it is highly prevalent among specific groups such as migrant workers, and in some regions particularly remote areas and the countryside," declared Wang Weizhen, deputy director of HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment at the Ministry of Health.

Those who most spread HIV are construction workers, miners and casual laborers, China health officials said. This is because they are frequently far from home and fed up. And while visiting local prostitutes, many of them don’t use condoms. "You must stay away from these women and keep yourself out of trouble, especially when you are working away from home," is the advice of Liu Guilin, 38, at a dusty construction site in eastern Beijing.

The ministry also said that 44,839 people with HIV/AIDS were found in China in the first nine months of 2008. 6,897 other individuals passed away due to the disease in the same period of time.

An estimated 50 percent of all Chinese people would avoid sharing a meal with an HIV carrier or an AIDS patient, an about 25 percent of them wouldn’t want to shake hands, according to Dr. Bernhard Schwartlander, country coordinator of UNAIDS in China.