HEALTH-CHINA: Waking Up to the HIV/AIDS Reality

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Antoaneta Bezlova

BEIJING, Mar 24 2005 (IPS) - After neglecting the danger of an HIV/AIDS pandemic for years, local authorities in several seriously affected regions in China have unveiled aggressive prevention and control measures that are stirring debates about individual rights here.

In recent months ”green harbours”, or purposely-built homes for HIV/AIDS patients, have been set up in several provinces, giving rise to fears that affected patients are being sent there without their consent. Detractors have dubbed the homes ‘quarantine wards’ and warned that isolating AIDS sufferers could lead to society shunning them.

Two of the most seriously affected areas – Henan province in central China and Yunnan in the southwest, have also introduced mandatory HIV tests for people working in the public entertainment and service industries. According to the new rules, anyone who wants to work in beauty parlours, massage centres, bath houses and discos must undergo HIV/AIDS and venereal disease tests before taking up their posts.

But opposing voices have been raised in response to this new policy because it ultimately discriminates against HIV carriers. Those who test positive for HIV or for venereal diseases would be denied a certificate of good health, without which they cannot legally work in the hospitality or service industries, according to a report by the state news agency ‘Xinhua’.

”Apart from the job loss, the problem here is that you cannot guarantee the confidentiality of HIV tests. If the patient’s privacy is not protected you cannot guarantee that these people are going to come forward and receive treatment,” said Prof. Jin Wei at the Central Communist Party School.

Jin Wei, who teaches city and provincial party leaders at the school about AIDS, said there exists a wide divide in attitudes towards HIV/AIDS in the country. In many provinces where the disease has had little visible impact, party leaders remain aloof to the problem and work on prevention is minimal.

In other areas like Henan and Yunnan where the HIV epidemic has caused deaths and made children into orphans – at the same time exhausting public health funds – the attitude is different. Here, Chinese leaders seem over-zealous in repairing their domains’ damaged images and are going all out to stem economic losses.

Henan province has China’s largest population of registered AIDS sufferers -26,000 according to official figures. AIDS activists however, say that up to one million Henan peasants have been infected with the disease after selling their blood at government-run health stations.

In the early 1990s local officials in Henan promoted blood sales as an easy way to eradicate poverty. Unscrupulous health workers bought blood from poor farmers, pooled it so they could extract the valuable plasma, and then injected what was left back into donors.

That made it possible for one HIV carrier to infect dozens of people. AIDS sufferers allege officials covered up the practice in return for a cut of the profits.

The pattern of negligence and corruption mirrors that in other parts of the country, where local governments have long ignored AIDS victims, considering them as an embarrassment.

Since 2002, attitudes toward HIV/AIDS at the top of Chinese leadership have changed. Chinese leaders have publicly admitted they have a growing domestic emergency on their hands and are committed to fighting it. In 2002 premier Wen Jiabao was the first Chinese top leader to be photographed shaking hands with an AIDS sufferer.

At the local level however, isolation and stigmatization of HIV carriers and AIDS sufferers remain the norm. Jin Wei, who has conducted a survey of communist party leaders across the country, said some 65 percent of them would resort to quarantine and isolation of their relatives if they had been found HIV positive.

”Discrimination against HIV/AIDS people is shocking even among the well-educated,” she said.

Not surprisingly, when Linfen city in Shanxi province unveiled its ”green harbour” for HIV/ AIDS patients, online forums and editorials went abuzz with debates about its real purposes.

”Green harbours or quarantine wards?” asked an editorial in the Beijing-based Xinjing Bao. Noting that Linfen city spent 1.5 million yuan (180,000 U.S. dollars) on building the home, the paper questioned the rationale for providing a long-term shelter for the patients.

”Is this a propaganda showcase? Is it an isolation colony? Or a real green harbour?” the editorial asked. ”Our real concern is – are the AIDS patients free to come and go?”

Supporters of the project have responded by comparing the ”green harbours” to clubs for AIDS sufferers. ”It is a blessing not to have to face a white hospital wall but to be back in a natural environment,” wrote Li Hui, an editor from Henan province in the newspaper ’21st Century Business Herald’.

Health researchers believe the newly unveiled measures represent a shift in the government’s policy of controlling the HIV/AIDS epidemic, from voluntary counseling and testing to more compulsory measures. The shift indicates authorities are increasingly worried that the disease is spreading from high-risk groups such as intra-venous drug users to the general population.

China’s Ministry of Health says they are only 840,000 HIV carriers, including 90,000 AIDS sufferers in the whole country. These numbers however, haven’t been updated since 2003. Many independent observers also dispute the figure because very few of the suspected HIV carriers have come forward to register with the authorities.

A mere 12.7 percent of that conservative number of patients was registered with the health authorities, and disease control centres only had detailed records of 4.2 percent, according to ‘Xinhua’ news agency.

The Untied Nations estimates that as many as 1.5 million people in China have HIV, and that 10 million could get it in five years if the epidemic goes unchecked.