The All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) and the International Labor Organization (ILO) Monday launched an ambitious project to prevent the spread of AIDS among the country's 150 million migrant workers.

    The three-year project will cover key industries and places that have a high concentration of migrant workers in Guangdong, Yunnan and Anhui provinces and the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.

    China has an estimated mobile population of about 150 million. The project will provide free education and training on HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment to as many migrant workers as possible.

    "Since the trend of the epidemic is shifting from drug use to sexual transmission in China, migrant workers have become increasingly vulnerable to HIV infection," said Richard Howard, an advisor to the HIV/AIDS Project of ILO's Beijing Office. "Many of them lack prevention knowledge and are separated from their families and social networks."

    According to the Ministry of Health, the country had 700,000 HIV/AIDS patients last year, and 51 percent of them had contracted the disease through sexual transmission.

    Figures of the Hunan center for disease control are even more alarming. They show the mobile population, mainly migrant workers, accounted for 77.1 percent of HIV/AIDS patients in the province last year.

    Howard warned that the challenges of adjusting to