Routine surveillance using convenient sampling found low prevalence of HIV and syphilis among female sex workers in China. Two consecutive surveys using respondent driven sampling were conducted in and to examine the prevalence of HIV and syphilis among female sex workers in Jinan, China. A face-to-face interview was conducted to collect demographic, behavioral and service utilization information using a structured questionnaire.
Blood samples were drawn for serological tests of HIV-1 antibody and syphilis antibody. Respondent Driven Sampling Analysis Tool was used to generate population level estimates. In and in , and subjects were recruited and surveyed respectively. Prevalence of syphilis was 2. Results are comparable to those from routine sentinel surveillance system in the city. Only Despite the low prevalence of syphilis and HIV, risk behaviors are common.
Targeted interventions to promote the safe sex and utilization of existing intervention services are still needed to keep the epidemic from growing. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. The dramatic social and economic transition over the past three decades in China has led to dramatic social structure changes with increasing economic disparities, individual freedom, and broader liberation of sexual attitudes. Of the estimated , infections in , The proportion of heterosexual contact has also been increasing in the newly reported infections in Shandong, an eastern coastal province in mainland China, reached The experience of African countries has already indicated that when the heterosexual transmission became the main mode of HIV transmission, the epidemic grew rapidly [4].
Of the contributors to the high proportion of heterosexual transmission, transmission from injection drug using population was precluded as injection drug use was never a problem in Shandong.
