**Young victim: Sun Weilin, 4, has HIV that she caught from her mother, who was infected when she had a caesarean section giving birth to her first child in a hospital in Henan.
Photo: AFP***
Posted on 11/30/2005 8:07:11 PM PST by Dr. Marten
**Young victim: Sun Weilin, 4, has HIV that she caught from her mother, who was infected when she had a caesarean section giving birth to her first child in a hospital in Henan.
Photo: AFP***
THE farming village of Shuangmiao, with 3000 people, is one of the worst hit by an HIV epidemic that spread in the heartland province of Henan a decade ago.
Already 180 people have died, and 400 are infected. New deaths occur frequently.
The virus spread from a grotesquely unhygienic commercial blood-collection business between 1992 and 1995 when impoverished villagers sold their blood almost daily, having their red corpuscles and other residues reinfused from common vats of the same blood type once plasma and other marketable components had been extracted. Perhaps 1 million people were infected.
Yet when China and the international community turn their attention today to the worldwide epidemic of HIV and AIDS, Shuangmiao and other villages like it will be barred to outsiders, and its residents blocked from external contact.
"There will be martial law on International AIDS Awareness Day," said villager Zhu Yuanyao, who is himself HIV positive. "No one will be allowed in and out. Someone from the town police will come down and stay in the village."
Although doctors are reporting progress in the Government's campaign to arrest deaths from AIDS, which began belatedly just over two years ago, the Communist Party is still keeping a blanket of secrecy over Henan's stricken villages such as Shuangmiao, where the total of HIV-infected people is still not reliably known.
The only exception is a showcase village called Wenlou, where visiting foreign experts and diplomats who insist on going to Henan are taken for carefully stage-managed meetings with grateful HIV-patients and solicitous doctors.
"It's all to protect one man," says Pierre Haski, correspondent of the Paris newspaper Liberation in Beijing and author of a new book on the Henan AIDS disaster, called Le Sang de la Chine (The Blood of China).
That man is Li Changchun, who as provincial Communist Party secretary was Henan's top political leader in 1992-98, when the blood-selling business was promoted by the provincial government and covered up when officials heard about its disastrous effects.
Now the eighth-ranking Communist leader in the top Politburo standing committee, 61-year-old Mr Li is superbly placed to continue the cover-up as party Propaganda Minister.
In Shuangmiao, the baleful effects of the cover-up are evident in the effort to ameliorate the suffering of the victims.
In August 2003, the newly installed Premier, Wen Jiabao, and a forceful deputy known as the "Iron Lady", Vice-Premier Wu Yi, promised free anti-retroviral drugs and testing for all HIV patients, as well as small monthly stipends for those needing support, including orphans.
The new policy came in the wake of China's embarrassment over a cover-up of the SARS-pneumonia epidemic that year, which led to pledges of transparency about epidemics and natural disasters. Two years later, the party is draining initiative and compassion from the delivery of services.
And the blame is being put on the victims, who are portrayed as greedy for selling their blood to allegedly illegal operations, even though government health clinics undertook blood collection and health officials and their families were prominent in numerous private-sector enterprises, with much of the blood going to two commercial offshoots of the People's Liberation Army.
Only one official has been punished in the whole fiasco. Ma Shiwen, a middle-ranking Henan health official, spent six months in jail in 2003 for allegedly leaking a secret report on the disaster to a Beijing NGO. All those widely regarded as culpable have gone on to receive promotions and perks.
The victims are livid. "If the local health bureau had now allowed these people to buy blood, and if they hadn't made the propaganda that selling blood was an honour and would benefit your health, the farmers would not have gone and sold their blood," villager Mr Zhu said in Shuangmiao.
His is a voice the party wants suppressed. To reach Shuangmiao last week, The Age had to drive in towards midnight, approaching the village by bumpy tracks through the barley fields, and leaving in the small hours of the morning. During the day and evening, the village has a checkpoint manned by paid vigilantes, ordered to turn back non-government activists and journalists.
The blood-selling business seemed a bonanza for poor villagers like Mr Zhu.
He sold 400cc units of his blood almost daily for a year from 1992, earning a net 45 yuan ($A7.50) each time, bringing an unprecedented flow of cash into the family.
No one knew about HIV or AIDS then, but after authorities started suppressing the blood business and villagers started weakening and dying a few years later, some found out when they went to seek medical help in Beijing and when a handful of Chinese doctors began exploring the epidemic amid official threats. Mr Zhu discovered that he and his wife, Zhang Winrong, were infected with HIV, along with their son. One of Mr Zhu's brothers has already died.
The extent of the Henan epidemic is unknown. The provincial Government did large-scale testing in 2004 and announced a total of just under 30,000 HIV cases, but there are experts who deride this.
Zhang Ke, one of the doctors who exposed the Henan epidemic, estimates 100,000 cases, but many NGOs think the figure could be 10 times as high.
The new policy came in the wake of China's embarrassment over a cover-up of the SARS-pneumonia epidemic that year, which led to pledges of transparency about epidemics and natural disasters. Two years later, the party is draining initiative and compassion from the delivery of services.
And the blame is being put on the victims, who are portrayed as greedy for selling their blood to allegedly illegal operations, even though government health clinics undertook blood collection and health officials and their families were prominent in numerous private-sector enterprises, with much of the blood going to two commercial offshoots of the People's Liberation Army.
Only one official has been punished in the whole fiasco. Ma Shiwen, a middle-ranking Henan health official, spent six months in jail in 2003 for allegedly leaking a secret report on the disaster to a Beijing NGO. All those widely regarded as culpable have gone on to receive promotions and perks.
The victims are livid. "If the local health bureau had now allowed these people to buy blood, and if they hadn't made the propaganda that selling blood was an honour and would benefit your health, the farmers would not have gone and sold their blood," villager Mr Zhu said in Shuangmiao.
His is a voice the party wants suppressed. To reach Shuangmiao last week, The Age had to drive in towards midnight, approaching the village by bumpy tracks through the barley fields, and leaving in the small hours of the morning. During the day and evening, the village has a checkpoint manned by paid vigilantes, ordered to turn back non-government activists and journalists.
The blood-selling business seemed a bonanza for poor villagers like Mr Zhu.
He sold 400cc units of his blood almost daily for a year from 1992, earning a net 45 yuan ($A7.50) each time, bringing an unprecedented flow of cash into the family.
No one knew about HIV or AIDS then, but after authorities started suppressing the blood business and villagers started weakening and dying a few years later, some found out when they went to seek medical help in Beijing and when a handful of Chinese doctors began exploring the epidemic amid official threats. Mr Zhu discovered that he and his wife, Zhang Winrong, were infected with HIV, along with their son. One of Mr Zhu's brothers has already died.
The extent of the Henan epidemic is unknown. The provincial Government did large-scale testing in 2004 and announced a total of just under 30,000 HIV cases, but there are experts who deride this.
Zhang Ke, one of the doctors who exposed the Henan epidemic, estimates 100,000 cases, but many NGOs think the figure could be 10 times as high.
There was a Japanese restaurant in NYC that had this policy. A Japanese friend of mine made the reservation for me.
We went to the restaurant, the host welcomed us and my friend then said his goodbyes. The restaurant manager had a cow.
China is only doing what clinton already did. (Or perhaps clinton learned from china?)
(I pinged you to posts 16 and 18 because I couldn't tell for sure if your name was on the list and I wanted you to see these. Not intending to pile on if you were already pinged to 16 but better safe than sorry)
What a pretty little girl......and what a shame!
Thank you.
I hate having to read yet another update on this money-making shameless scourge. :-(
On the other hand, at least it is finally in the open and we CAN read about it.
Pinz
So what's the root cause of this disease? Homosexual sodomy?
"So what's the root cause of this disease? Homosexual sodomy?"
In China it's ignorance. The majority of the people in China who get AIDS/HIV get it from blood transfusions, donating blood and from medical procedures.
It's sad.
I wonder how long they were able to get away with that.
It probably wasn't a joke. Do some searches on the Arkansas prisonor blood and aids scandals under Gov. Clinton.
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