Over 100 massage girls working for a major sauna center in Guangzhou City in South China were diagnosed with venereal diseases (VD) in a recent health exam.
Doctors found that more than 80 percent of the center’s over 130 massage girls carry venereal diseases, including syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia. More than ten girls had to be hospitalized.
According to local newspaper Yangcheng Evening New , these girls are all very young, mostly around 20. Lacking knowledge about VD, many of the girls didn’t even realize they had been affected.
Like most cities in today’s China, Guangzhou is filled with tens of thousands of young prostitutes, many working in entertainment places like saunas, spa salons, and nightclubs. For their employers, these girls are merely money-making machines whose health is of little importance. As very few employers would send their girls to take physical examinations, the total number of the city’s VD patient is unknown.
“I was appalled when I flipped through their examination reports,” said a doctor in the hospital that examined these girls. “I’ve been a doctor for many years, but I’ve never seen such a high VD morbidity rate.”
Xia was one of the massage girls diagnosed VD. She has been in this business for three years, first in a hair salon, then hotels and sauna centers. “I’m called a massage girl,” said Xia, “but I know little about massaging. None of us know what real massaging is.” She told the reporter that not one of the salons and sauna centers she worked for was decent business. Some of such places, Xia said, gave girls pre-job trainings on how to wait on customers and provide sexual services.
