Killed by corruption 

China's rural poor are the main victims of the world's fastest-growing HIV epidemic 

Isabel Hilton
Monday November 3, 2003
The Guardian 

How many Aids victims are there in China? Nobody knows the exact answer, but the Chinese government has been forced to admit that an outbreak known to affect one province does, in fact, affect most of central China. Previously, Beijing had admitted that Henan province was badly hit. But now it appears that not one but seven central provinces are involved. The victims are not drug users or sex workers; they are dying because of poverty and official corruption. 
The first person to be diagnosed with Aids in China was a foreign tourist, in 1985. Then, in the south-west, the disease took hold among intravenous drug users. But the real scandal is the infection of the rural poor in central China who sold plasma at state-run blood collection points in the early and mid-90s. Today the government admits to more than a million HIV-positive citizens and officially forecasts that 10 million will be affected within seven years. 
HIV infection is increasing by 30% a year in China - the world's fastest-growing epidemic, fed by corruption, greed, poverty and the collapse of state health services. In this dismal story, the plasma collection episode is the most shocking. 
Worst affected were, of course, the poorest: rural farmers left behind in China's scramble towards feral capitalism. They were hit first because they were desperate enough to overcome the Chinese cultural aversion to selling blood, for two or three pounds. 
It might not have mattered, but official corruption is at its most cruel in the countryside, where a local official can rule like a petty but all-powerful tyrant. Such officials know little and care less about the elementary rules of hygiene in blood collection. Even in what remains of the rural health services, the WHO estimates that two-thirds of the injections given in China are unsafe. 
Once infected blood entered the plasma collection system, it was distributed freely among the poorest of the poor. And finally when the symptoms of Aids began to appear, the same local officials suppressed the news and persecuted those few who tried to raise the alarm. In this looking-glass world, it is the victims and those who try to help them who are treated like criminals. 
Last year, the government was forced to acknowledge this dismal chain of events in Henan. But in a confidential report submitted to the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, Beijing has admitted that six other provinces in central China are affected in the same way. The epidemic is not confined to a few villages in Henan; it occupies the heartland of the country in the provinces of Anhui, Hebei, Hubei, Shanxi, Shaanxi and Shandong. As a recent Human Rights Watch report pointed out, not a single local official has been prosecuted for this catastrophe, no independent investigation has taken place and no compensation has been offered to the victims. 
This is more than an offence against justice; the government's attitude is a recipe for further disaster. HIV/Aids victims are a persecuted group who are often refused admission to hospitals and have to leave home to find anonymity and work in the cities. Their forced mobility spreads the virus, while HIV/Aids activists are detained and charged with betraying state secrets. 
Beijing is belatedly taking action on the epidemic. But to fight HIV/Aids, you first have to know what you are dealing with. Researchers in Henan estimate that the province alone may have a million victims. If that pattern is repeated over the other six provinces the government now admits are involved, there could already be 6 million victims. 
The Chinese government continues to resist attempts to democratise the Communist party's sclerotic monopoly of power. But the plasma collection scandal offers Beijing a clear opportunity to demonstrate that it is serious about both addressing corruption and forcing government officials to be accountable for the evils they inflict on the people they rule. This is an issue not of democracy but of governance - and so far, not only is there no sign of government action, but those who ask for it risk their liberty. 
Beijing has, though, realised that the HIV/Aids virus does not listen to political exhortation and has asked for money to fight the epidemic from the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria. It is in everybody's interests that action taken is effective. If the fund wishes to get the maximum out of its money, it must insist that the plasma disaster be investigated thoroughly, that the government stop persecuting the whistle-blowers and that the true picture of HIV/Aids infection be revealed. Beijing demonstrated that it could mobilise its health sector for Sars. It's time to stop hiding an Aids epidemic that official corruption created. 
[http://www.guardian.co.uk/aids/story/0,7369,1076544,00.html]