InterPress News Service (IPS); Friday, 12 July 1996.
Rajiv Chandra

Throughout China, the AIDS-causing HIV virus is spreading through injected drug use, sexual contact and mother-to-child transmission. And while today intravenous drug use accounts for most of the AIDS cases in China, unprotected sex is expected to be the main cause of the future spread of the virus.

"Public conceptions of marriage and sex are changing. Heterosexual transmission must be the focus of efforts to stop the spread," says Chen Chunming, a researcher at the China Academy of Preventive Medicine in Beijing.

"Prevention is the only way to control AIDS. We have to educate people with correct morals about love, family and sex," says Chen.

Within the last year, China has seen a huge jump in the number of detected AIDS cases. The official Health Daily newspaper recently reported that 3,341 Chinese have been infected with human immunodefiency virus (HIV), with 47 per cent of the cases found last year. Of those infected, 117 had developed full-blown AIDS, including 52 new cases detected in 1995.

However, AIDS experts say that due to insufficient reporting, limited testing and mis-diagnosis, the real number of Chinese infected with HIV could be as high as 100,000.

Officially, the government had long regarded AIDS as a "foreigners' disease" and denied that the deadly virus was spreading due to the problems of prostitution, drug use and public ignorance.

During the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, those vices, rampant in China before the Communist take-over in 1949, were kept under control by tight government reins on the economy and strict state control over individuals.

Chinese officials maintain that sexually transmitted diseases were almost wiped out during the decade-long Cultural Revolution launched in 1966.

But with China's opening to the outside world in 1979 and its move toward a market-style economy, prostitution and intravenous drug use have again become more common, although it remains politically and culturally sensitive.

Currently, the largest concentration of HIV-positive patients is in south-western Yunnan province, an area bordering on major drug- production centres in Burma (also known as Myanmar) and awash in heroin.

The Yunnan border area has seven per cent of those diagnosed HIV- positive in China, the government admits, although health officials privately say that as many as half of those with the disease live in the province.

In 1995, the Chinese Academy of Medical Science estimated that the number of those infected could exceed 266,000 by the turn of the century. This is not as alarming as elsewhere in Asia like India and Thailand, but unscreened and unprotected blood supplies in China could quickly worsen the problem, health officials say.

The Ministry of Public Health has undertaken a major public education campaign on AIDS prevention and called on hospitals to enforce a rigid blood-screening process.

The government has also highlighted the extent of public ignorance and the urgent need to increase AIDS awareness in the face of the rising number of sufferers.

"The stage has been set for a problem that could worsen dramatically," says a Western diplomat who has visited the area in Yunnan.

The infection has spread since China opened its borders with Burma, Laos and Vietnam to trade during the last decade. Sexual intercourse and needle-sharing, a common practice among the area's many heroin-users, helped the disease proliferate.

In Ruili and other towns just across the border from Burma, the presence of hundreds of prostitutes has compounded the tragedy.

Condoms were only recently introduced in more remote places in China since for years, the favoured methods of birth control under the country's stringent family planning programme were intrauterine devices (IUDs) and sterilisation.

An extensive public education campaign against sexually transmitted diseases has been introduced in the area, although the local rate of infection is already high, officials say.

Indeed, Chinese researchers worry that sexual intercourse more than drug use will be the major transmitter of the AIDS virus in the future. Arrests for prostitution are on the rise, hitting 50 per cent annually in some areas. Pre-marital sex is also increasingly common among college students, many of whom do not take the necessary, newspaper surveys have shown.

Ignorance is also worsening the AIDS crisis in China. In February, the official Chinese press prominently reported the widespread fear caused by an AIDS case in Hunan province. Xiao Gaopan, a Chinese labourer who worked on a railway project in Tanzania for two years, was diagnosed as having AIDS in 1992.

Horrified that the rest of the family might catch the disease, his wife and children shut him off in a room, leaving a plate of food outside his door daily. He died alone late last year, although that was not the end of the hysteria.

Even though many acquaintances of the family have since tested negative for the HIV-virus, they treat Xiao's relatives as pariahs and have tried to drive them out of the village.

The family has been persecuted. One daughter has lost her job, another was abandoned by her husband and the son's marriage is on the rocks. "His disease robbed us of everything," Xiao Huji, the man's widow was quoted as saying.(END/IPS/AP-PR-HE/RC/CPG/96)

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