At least 1,281 people died of infectious diseases in mainland China last month, the National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC) announced.

The fatality, however, is just 0.15 percent of the total 836,954 reported infectious diseases in the country and less than 0.000095 percent of China's entire population.

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The NHFPC released their monthly report on infectious diseases on Thursday, with numbers holding steady between 1,100 and 1,800 per month. The commission said the latest peak was recorded in December 2013, where at least 1,764 lives were lost.

No cases of Class-A infectious diseases, or what frequently are known to cause pandemics/widespread epidemics, were reported. The category includes killers and debilitating diseases such as plague and cholera.

Some 325,953 cases of Class-B infectious diseases were reported. The category includes AIDS, hepatitis, tuberculosis, syphilis, dysentery and gonorrhea and is believed to have claimed 1,207 lives.

Class-C infectious diseases making up the vast majority of cases are foot-and-mouth disease, infectious diarrhea, influenza and mumps and is reported to have caused 74 deaths in China throughout April.

Consistently, the major killer has been AIDS, claiming on average 1,000 lives a month in China alone.

Estimated numbers are around 780,000 Chinese infected with HIV, though it remains less than 0.1% of the population or much less than in many European countries.

AIDS/HIV has in later years become a major point of concern for Chinese authorities for this very reason, with dramatically improved education on the topic since the programs for public awareness started in the early 2000s.

Stigma and discrimination toward those who have already contracted the disease remain, however, prompting a lot of cases to go unreported until the condition of the affected individuals become so severe as to be hospitalized.

This, despite statistics showing that the vast majority of people in China living with HIV/AIDS were infected through heterosexual sex, rather than the common view of either being infected through intravenous drug use or homosexual encounters.

The second biggest killer, China's news service Xinhua reports, is tuberculosis, accounting for more than 10,000 deaths each year.

Currently, China ranks as having the second biggest tuberculosis epidemic only after India, and is also considered a major health concern for authorities, with detection rates stagnant and multidrug-resistant tuberculosis rising.

Since the outbreak of SARS in 2003, Chinese authorities have been increasingly concerned with building up their public health system with increased funding and revised laws to better detect and control infectious diseases, prompting these monthly reports.

The NHFPC was created in March 2013 as an amalgamation of the Ministry of Health, which was formerly in charge of these reports, and the National Population and Family Planning Commission, concerned with population control.

Important to note is that Chinese authorities use a different scale than the one widely used by the CDC and other western agencies, where the classifications are named similarly but are used to describe different kinds of diseases.

TagsInfectious disease, AIDS, Tuberculosis, April, National Health and Family Planning Commission, HIV, Dysentery, hepatitis, Syphilis, influenza, gonorrhea, diarrhea, plague, cholera, foot-and-mouth