The alarming rise of HIV/AIDS cases at Ningbo University in Zhejiang Province has prompted officials to call students into action and “adopt a moral lifestyle”.

According to an article published on the official WeChat account of the Ningbo Center for Disease Control (CDC) called “Has the Wolf arrived? The AIDS Epidemic of Ningbo Students”, last year 30 students at the University contracted HIV. Although HIV can be transmitted a number of ways, 80 percent of cases at Ningbo are said to have been transmitted from male-to-male sexual contact.

Zhang Yan, the Ningbo CDC official in charge of AIDS prevention and control, published the statistics which suggested that a gay lifestyle was the root cause. Zhang said:

A lot of people think that schools are like some kind of ivory tower, and so they let down their guard (when they attend). Publishing these local statistics serves as a call to action for students to adopt a moral lifestyle and establish a healthy sexuality.

In 2013, 87.1 percent of all new AIDS cases in China were sexually transmitted, with gay men being the group most at risk. Estimates of AIDS cases in China vary from 430,000 to 1.5 million and, in 2008, AIDS became the leading cause of death by infectious disease in China, with approximately 7,000 fatalities that year.