RESUMEN
Objective To investigate the fear and attitude of the common people to some threatening diseases .Methods Accord-ing to the age and sex structure of the whole nation ,500 common people were randomly enrolled in the public places of Chongqing main urban area .Firstly ,the respondents were asked to name three diseases they feared most .Then their fear degrees to eight im-portant diseases were performed the questionnaire survey .Results The top ten diseases that common people fear most by their own words were cancer ,AIDS ,heart disease ,hypertension ,stroke ,leukemia ,chronic liver diseases ,diabetes mellitus ,dementia and de-pression successively .Meanwhile ,their fear to the eight important diseases ,which was determined by the ratio of people who did fear to all ,were cancer(94 .2% ) ,traffic accidents(89 .2% ) ,heart disease(85 .0% ) ,AIDS(79 .4% ) ,tuberculosis(76 .8% ) ,hepatitis B(76 .6% ) ,Alzheimer′s disease(73 .4% ) and depression(69 .0% ) .Further analysis showed that such fear was significantly influ-enced by age ,sex and education level .Conclusion The knowledge and perception of common people about certain diseases is one-si-ded ,and their health awareness should be improved .