Student volunteers from universities in Qingdao, Shandong Province, dress up on World AIDS Day to promote awareness of the virus and urge people not to discriminate against victims of the disease. Photo: CFP

Younger people are more at risk of HIV infection, with the rate having doubled from 2008 to 2012, and male-to-male sex is the prominent contributing factor, a senior health official has said.

The rate of infections seen in males over 60 has also risen, possibly due to lifestyle changes, said health authorities.

Shang Hong, director of the HIV/AIDS key lab under the National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC) said that in 2012, there were 434,000 HIV/AIDS infections and 1.7 percent of these were Chinese youths aged between 15 and 24, up from 0.9 percent in 2008, and the number of infected college students keeps rising.

Revealing the figures at an event Saturday ahead of Sunday's World AIDS Day, Shang added that 95 percent of the infected in the group were males, and 70 percent of these infections came through male-to-male sex, the Xinhua News Agency reported.

"Many college students have lacked basic sex knowledge since childhood and face risks in sexual behavior. This fact is often ignored by universities," Wu Zunyou, director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) HIV/AIDS prevention and control center, told the Global Times on Sunday.

A survey conducted by Jiang Jianping, a biology professor from Fujian Normal University, that polled 169 college students, showed that 90 percent of students know sex, blood and from mother to child are the causes of HIV infection.

But only 83 percent of them said they know the virus can also be transmitted through intravenous injections. Twenty percent even thought mosquito bites could transmit the virus. Over 80 percent of students said that they know the disease could not be cured and eight percent said they did not know, Fuzhou-based Strait News reported Sunday.

This growth in infection through sexual activity is a great change from infection patterns of the past, Cui Li, a vice director with the NHFPC said Saturday, the Beijing Youth Daily reported. Statistics from January to September show that 98.9 percent of 70,000 HIV infections are infected through sex, Cui said. 

The HIV virus used to be more transmitted among drug addicts and through mother-to-child, but because of the nation's strengthening education on drugs and parental knowledge, these types of infections have dropped, Wu said.

From 2005 to 2010, an increasing number of males over 60 have been infected with the virus.

According to the CDC, males above 60 infected with HIV increased from 2.2 percent to 8.9 percent, while male AIDS patients of the same age increased from 5.4 percent to 11 percent, the Guangzhou Daily reported Saturday.

"Many infected older people are from empty nest families. With the improvement of their daily life, some people abandon traditional family ethics. And the current society is becoming more tolerant to extramarital affairs and prostitution," Shen Jie, a vice president with Chinese Association of Sexually Transmitted Disease and AIDS Prevention and Control,

In an earlier report, Chinese President Xi Jinping called on the public to jointly eliminate discrimination and help provide timely and effective treatment and support for HIV carriers and AIDS patients, Xinhua reported.