Selling blood has spread AIDS throughout the country
Beijing (AsiaNews/AFP) For China AIDS is becoming an ever greater health and social epidemic. The Ministry of Health has admitted that blood sold in the 1990s has caused the spread of AIDS throughout the country. Ministry officials said blood was sold in all Chinese provinces.
The ministry's statement, coming after years of government denial regarding the country's AIDS problem, was issued just last week at the inauguration of a joint China-US program to prevent the spread of the deadly disease.
At the ceremony it was announced that 15 million dollar fundraising campaign was launched to fight AIDS in China. Ray Yip, director of the American Disease Control and Prevention Center in China said farmers who traveled across the country selling their blood became infected and spread AIDS throughout China.
Yip also said that "only 10% of seropositive people know they have contracted the virus. This means that 90% of sick persons are ignorant of the fact they have AIDS and that they can infect others."
Often hunger and desperation pushes China's poor and rural citizens to sell their blood. Frequently the government is to blame for the spread of the virus, as happened in the province of Henan where a million persons became infected with AIDS after donating blood at state-run clinics where proper health precautions had not been taken.
Meanwhile, the media have reported the news of a band of criminals all infected with AIDS who managed to avoid going to prison for months. During this period they opened wounds and threatened to infect police and victims of their crimes if they didn't obey their commands. Members of the "AIDS Gang" had willfully and knowingly infected one another, believing they could escape from serving their prison terns if ill with deadly disease.
However a court in Hangzhou (capital of Zhejiang), where last year the gang had committed over 500 robberies, sentenced 5 of the men from 18 months to 3 years and a half years in prison. The other 8 members are still awaiting their sentencing.
Human rights activists together with Gao Yanling, an HIV/AIDS expert at Fudan University's School of Public Heath in Shanghai, say that the lack of state support causes many AIDS victims to commit crimes.
At the end of 2002 China's Ministry of Health estimated that there were more than 1 million people suffering from AIDS in the country. The disease has spread at of rate of 30%, the highest in the world. According to the UN agency UNAIDS, should there not be an efficient solution to controlling the spread, by 2010 China could well have more than 10 million people infected with the disease and 260,000 "AIDS orphans". (MR)
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02/12/2009
