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Politic-Economic-Society-Tech

China Warns of 'Dangerous' AIDS Epidemic

By Jeremy Page

China has launched a drive to curb the spread of the HIV virus (news - web sites) through tainted blood transfusions amid warnings that an AIDS (news - web sites) epidemic is reaching dangerous levels, the official Xinhua news agency reported on Friday.

The government will spend $12 million annually on the program, which follows reports in state media of mass infections from unregulated blood banks in villages in the central province of Henan.

According to official statistics, China had 23,905 reported HIV (news - web sites)/AIDS cases at the end of March this year, Xinhua said.

But Health Ministry experts say the number could be more than 600,000 and the United Nations (news - web sites) has said China will have 10 million or more HIV/AIDS sufferers by 2010 unless it acts decisively.

China drew up a plan in 1998 to keep HIV cases below 1.5 million by 2010, Xinhua quoted Chen Xianyi, deputy director of the Ministry of Health's Department of Disease Control, as saying.

``However, the plan has not been effectively implemented in some places because local officials are still unaware of the seriousness of the epidemic, even though the actual situation is getting really dangerous,'' said Chen.

The new program aimed to reduce the annual growth rate of HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted disease cases to below 10 percent by 2005 from more than 30 percent in recent years, Xinhua said.

INTRAVENOUS DRUG USE

The government's top priority was to combat intravenous drug use and contaminated blood transfusions which accounted for 71.2 percent of HIV/AIDS cases in China, Xinhua said.

Xinhua did not mention the AIDS epidemic in Henan, but reports in state media of HIV infection rates of up to 65 percent in some villages caused a sensation earlier this year.

Farmers sold blood for $5 per sample to purchasing stations -- some run by local government officials -- which pooled the donations in a large tub and extracted the valuable plasma. The mixed blood was them pumped back into the donors to prevent them becoming anemic.

``As an epidemic, it's a very unique one,'' a United Nations AIDS expert who works closely with the World Health Organization (news - web sites) in China told Reuters.

``They pool it, then people get blood back. But they do not get their own blood back, they get multiple blood transfusions.''

Local and national officials have been keen to keep the scandal under wraps.

AIDS activists have had pamphlets confiscated, Chinese reporters have been warned off the story and foreign journalists visiting the area have been detained by Henan officials, reporters and witnesses say.

China barred one Henan AIDS expert, Gao Yaojie, from traveling to the United States in May to receive the Jonathan Mann award for her campaign to spread AIDS awareness and bring help to the suffering.

UNRELIABLE STATISTICS

Paid blood donation campaigns launched in the 1980s to meet a shortage of plasma have petered out since a 1998 government decree that samples had to come from unpaid, voluntary donors, a UN report said.

But experts are still struggling to determine how widespread the practice is in China, which reported its first case of AIDS in 1985.

Statistics are unreliable because of under-reporting and inadequate study, but AIDS experts tell of high infection levels in far western Xinjiang, Yunnan and Guangxi in the south -- and Henan.

``The AIDS epidemic is happening and in the future the epidemic is going to expand very quickly,'' said the UN expert. ''Exponential growth, that's what it's about.''

The new program would aim to reduce the infection rate from contaminated blood transfusions to one in every 100,000 transfusions by 2005, Xinhua said.

More than 85 percent of blood for clinical use would be provided by non-profit blood centers, while authorized hospitals would supply the rest, it said.

source: Reuters, Aug 3, 2001


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