AEGiS-AP: Villagers in northeastern China contracted AIDS by selling blood, group says

Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2003. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.

Villagers in northeastern China contracted AIDS by selling blood, group says

Wall Street Journal - November 21, 2003
Audra Ang, Associated Press Writer

BEIJING (AP) -- Dozens of villagers in northeastern China have contracted the AIDS virus by selling blood and at least 20 have died, a human rights organization said Friday.

Blood tests have proven that 62 villagers from Soudengzhan in Jilin province are HIV-positive, part of a total of 300 people who may be infected, said the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy.

"It is urgent to get the spread of disease under control in the area," said Frank Lu, who runs the organization.

Government officials at various levels have covered up the infections to protect Liu Baozhong, party secretary of Soudengzhan, who has been singled out for praise by former President Jiang Zemin, Lu said.

"It is because of this that officials have covered up this serious matter," he said. "AIDS is spreading in that town and other places around the country."

A woman who answered the telephone at the Soudengzhan town government said only that "no one has contracted AIDS here." She would give only her family name, Yao.

At Jilin's city health bureau, which oversees Soudengzhan, a man who answered the telephone said he "hadn't heard anything about the cases." He refused to give his name.

About 1 million people in China are HIV-positive, mostly intravenous drug users and people infected from blood-buying schemes in central China. Chinese officials and the United Nations warn that 10 million people could be infected by 2020 without more effective prevention.

Thousands of villagers sold their blood to the donation station after it opened in 1992, the center said. The station closed three years later, it said, but did not give a reason or provide more details.

In the central province of Henan, thousands were infected with the AIDS virus by an unsanitary blood-buying industry in the 1990s, when dealers bought blood from villagers and pooled it, mixing healthy blood with HIV-infected blood.

They extracted plasma, a blood component with medical uses, and re-injected the rest back into the sellers.
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