Few in China Aware They May Be HIV-positive

Only 10 percent of China’s estimated one million people infected with HIV know they carry the deadly virus, exacerbating the difficulty of preventing the spread of the disease, U.S. experts said on Tuesday.

Only 10 percent of China’s estimated one million people infected with HIV know they carry the deadly virus, exacerbating the difficulty of preventing the spread of the disease, U.S. experts said on Tuesday. China is one of the three countries most at risk from AIDS outside Africa and health agencies say it could have 10 million victims by 2010 if it fails to take the scourge seriously. The other two countries most at risk are Russia and India. “Some 90 percent of sufferers in China don’t know they are infected,” said Ray Yip, head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in China at the launch of the Global AIDS Program in Beijing. “Every day HIV carriers are unaware of their status is another day they can spread the virus,” he said in remarks that underscored concerns among activists at a lack of AIDS awareness training and testing in a country where the system of government has long fostered secrecy. Officials say between 840,000 and one million people out of China’s population of 1.3 billion have HIV. U.S. Ambassador Clark Randt said the world’s most populous country still has a chance to prevent the spread of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, from reaching catastrophic proportions if it acts swiftly. “An HIV/AIDS catastrophe can only be avoided if China responds now, urgently and forcefully, with sufficient resources to stem this deadly tide,” he told the program launch. Many activists estimate the extent of the disease to be far greater than official figures show, with more than one million people infected in central Henan province alone in recent years by blood-selling schemes. The clinics paid farmers to extract their blood plasma, then pumped the unused components back into the donor from a pool tainted with blood from other people. They say this process infected legions of people in six neighboring provinces. TOO MUCH SECRECY Beijing has faced widespread condemnation for disguising the scale of its AIDS epidemic, neglecting to treat patients properly and arresting activists and journalists. Rights groups and experts have said the Global Program would not be able to ensure the aid is well spent. The U.S. Department of Health and Human services awarded the program $15 million over five years to treat Chinese with HIV infection. Qi Xiaoqiu, a director general at the Health Ministry’s department of disease control, said the main lesson the ministry learned from the SARS outbreak last year was the importance of openness and transparency. “The numbers have always been a headache for us,” he said. “We lost out in the beginning (with SARS) because we were not open with reporting information.” Farmers living in hundreds of “AIDS villages” dotted across the central province of Henan say they have few incentives to be tested because the procedure is expensive and available only in cities. “We can’t afford to have me tested because we’re in debt paying for my father’s drugs,” Tang Guangwei, a 21-year-old Henan resident whose father has AIDS, told Reuters over the weekend. Others say they would rather not know their status because rural health services are backward and might not guarantee treatment or counselling. (Source: Reuters Health, March 2004)