Fueled by Heroin, AIDS Spreads in China’s South.

The two-year-old clung to her mother and screamed when a hypodermic needle pierced her ankle, drawing blood.

The two-year-old clung to her mother and screamed when a hypodermic needle pierced her ankle, drawing blood. Nurses emptied the sample into a glass vial to test for HIV, the virus that has infected the girl’s parents. The father – a skinny, ashen-faced, 28-year-old businessman – caught the disease after using dirty needles to shoot up heroin. Her mother, 24, was infected through sexual intercourse. The family, from the city of Dali in the southwestern province of Yunnan, wished to remain anonymous to health workers, using only the identification “F81.” “Heroin use is rampant in Yunnan, especially in the rural areas. It’s so cheap that the poorest farmer can afford it,” said Fang Qing, a nurse at the Yunnan Center for Disease Control, who treated the couple. “People get bored or get sick, and they take heroin. They don’t know it’s dangerous to share needles,” she said, taking a break from drawing blood, taking blood pressure and doling out advice on medication to a steady stream of visitors. Officials and doctors say Yunnan, which borders Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam and lies near the “Golden Triangle” heroin-producing region where Myanmar, Laos and Thailand meet, faces an explosion in HIV cases as heroin users transmit the virus to relatives. Chinese experts recite a litany of ills – ignorance, shame, discrimination and a lack of skilled health professionals – that block efforts to fight the disease, which is now spreading to key economic regions such as Guangdong and Shanghai. The United Nations says China may have more than 10 million AIDS patients by 2010 if it does not take immediate and forceful action against the epidemic. LIFE ON STREETS Experts say they learn a great deal from HIV-positive patients such as Xiao Xiaoquan, who started using heroin at 13. Just five feet tall and with androgynous features, the 21-year-old never fully developed into a man because of his drug use. “I started taking heroin because I had a fever and headache that wouldn’t go away, ” said Xiao, who now lives at the Daytop Center, a Kunming-based voluntary rehabilitation center.”Within a week, I was hooked. I had to get more. So I ran away and joined a gang of kids who were also hooked. We did bad things: stealing, picking pockets and dealing drugs.” The gang turned to shooting up heroin, instead of smoking, to save money. Xiao said he often shared a needle with five others, not knowing he could catch a deadly disease that way. Help came in the form of an Australian woman visiting his hometown on holiday in 2001 who persuaded Xiao to kick the habit. “If I didn’t have AIDS, I’d be a normal person,” he said, dressed in crisp clothes and shiny black leather loafers. Xiao has snapped ties with former friends, still living on the streets, in an effort to stay clean and re-enter society. FREE NEEDLES, CONDOMS Yunnan reported China’s first cases of HIV among drug users in 1989. The province now has more than 10,000 registered sufferers and a possible 70,000 who do not yet know they are carriers, officials said. Official figures put the number of people infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, at 840,000 in China. Activists and experts estimate the extent of the outbreak is far higher, saying more than a million may be infected in the central province of Henan alone after rural blood-selling schemes in the 1990s led to the infection of entire villages. The Yunnan government is considered among the most progressive in fighting the virus. It rolled out a ground-breaking condom and needle distribution program this year, a move praised by activists and aid workers. Despite the aggressive campaign, featuring free condoms in hotels and colorful posters with slogans in Chinese and ethnic minority languages, officials said they had a hard time finding sufferers willing to share their experiences with the public. HIV victims shy away from publicity because they are regularly fired from their jobs, evicted from their homes and denied medical care in hospitals, activists say. “Discrimination against AIDS patients is severe in China, more so than other countries in the world,” Sun Jiangping, vice director of the National Sexual Diseases and AIDS Prevention and Control Center, told Reuters. “This is a critical time,” he said. “The entire country is in a high growth period.” (Source: Reuters Health, June 2004)