Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2001. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Associated Press - November 13, 2001
Despair at finding treatment drove the two from their home village in Henan province, 620 miles south of the capital. Now, renting a room in a polluted village on Beijing's northern edge, Zhang petitions doctors and pharmaceutical companies for help that might save his only child.
Many of the hundreds of thousands of Chinese infected with the HIV virus that causes AIDS have long fought their battles in silence and without hope, shunned as an embarrassment by officials and ignored by a health care system unable to cope.
But alarm over the 30 percent annual growth rate of the disease is causing official attitudes to change. Doctors, activists, officials and AIDS patients are holding China's first national AIDS conference starting today.
The official Xinhua News Agency described the conference as an effort to "spur vigilance against the disease in all corners of Chinese society." The goal is to slow the growth of new infections to 10 percent per year by 2005.
Experts estimate that more than 600,000 Chinese -- in a population of 1.26 billion -- were infected by HIV by the end of 2000.
Needle sharing by intravenous drug users established the disease in China and the flourishing sex trade has fanned it, the government says. Health authorities failed to protect the blood supply, causing the disease to spread in the countryside, officials say.
Zhang's daughter, who wears her beloved Snoopy jacket even indoors, caught the disease from a blood transfusion during surgery five years ago. This summer, she began to develop fevers and lesions on her body, signs of full-blown AIDS.
In Henan, unscrupulous blood buyers operated for years with little regard for the health of their donors. They bought blood from poor farmers, pooled it to extract valuable plasma, and then injected what was left back into donors. Blood from one HIV carrier could infect dozens of people. Up to 50,000 people caught the disease this way, officials say.
Villagers claim officials covered up the practice in return for a cut of the profits.
"They didn't test ... Now the results are appearing," Zhang Jianqi said, as his daughter played with a visitor's mobile phone.
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