BEIJING, August 11, 2006 (AFP) - China has released a Chinese AIDS patient and activist detained for nearly a month -- four days ahead of the world's biggest-ever AIDS conference, a group said Friday.
Li Xige, a postal worker who contracted AIDS from a hospital blood transfusion during childbirth, was released on Thursday by police in Ningling county, central China's Henan province, the Beijing Aizhixing Institute said.
"The government is most concerned with its international image," Wan Yanhai, director of the AIDS non-government organisation told AFP.
"The Chinese government is planning to participate in the major AIDS conference. International AIDs groups planned to protest over the arrest. ... Also in the past three weeks, the government received a lot of criticism from international and domestic AIDS groups over the arrest."
The International AIDS Conference, an event held every two years, opens on Sunday in Toronto, with an expected attendance of some 20,000 researchers, campaigners and public health experts. It runs until Friday, August 18.
China's health ministry is sending a delegation there and a deputy health minister will attend the conference.
Police arrested Li and two other AIDS patients on July 20 while they and eight others were appealing in front of the health ministry in Beijing for government compensation for people like her infected because of the country's unsafe blood supply.
The group had intended peacefully to petition the ministry for better compensation but were taken in by authorities and driven back to Henan, according to Wan.
Li's family was later informed that she had been officially detained on suspicion of "assembling crowds to attack state organs," Wan said. The other participants in the failed attempt to petition the government were released before police freed Li.
Li did not know she was infected with HIV in 1995 when having her first baby. The child, a girl, died in 2004. A second child has also been infected.
Many people in China may have been infected with HIV while receiving blood transfusions in hospitals, but most only find out later as they develop symptoms or their family members die.
The government has made efforts to clean up its blood supply in recent years, but there are still occassional reports of infections through transfusions.
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