Sixty percent of China's 1,832 counties have signed up to a health education initiative for rural populations, Deputy Health Minister Gao Qiang said in Beijing on Wednesday.

Gao made the announcement at a seminar on the National Health Promotion Project for Chinese Farmers. The project aims to universalize health education amongst the country's 900 million rural people who often lack access to information on basic hygiene and other issues.

Statistics show that more than 80 percent of China's infectious diseases occur in rural areas. Absence of medical services is one reason, but another is ignorance of how to maintain basic, daily hygiene.

According to a Ministry of Health survey from 2000, only 36 percent of rural people over fifteen years old had a good grounding in the importance of clean water, a sanitary environment and prevention of diseases.

The initiative plans to set up classes in 90, 80 and 70 percent of elementary and middle schools in eastern, central and western provinces respectively. It will also enable 90, 70 and 50 percent of the three provinces' village clinics to run health-consulting services.

Largely media-based, the program has produced 24 TV and 30 radio programs to be broadcast in over 2,000 rural counties. It has also published several books on health and hygiene written in simple language and dotted with illustrations.

China has lacked a functioning rural medical service network since the cooperation system, a collective mechanism offering cheap medical services, collapsed in 1980s.

There are 1.2 million junior medical staff in rural clinics, who, according to Gao, are "almost incapable of curing diseases" for lack of professional training.

In addition, rural areas lack a sanitation infrastructure, which makes them vulnerable to infectious diseases.

"Many diseases could be prevented with basic hygiene knowledge. We are trying to enable them to help themselves," said Gao.

(Xinhua News Agency November 11, 2004)