Miami Herald - Wednesday, November 14, 2001
Michael Dorgan, Herald World Staff

Many Chinese officials once denied the disease existed, viewing it as a reason for shame and fearing it would scare off investors. The government now has launched a highly publicized five-year plan of education and prevention that Piot said demonstrates a "serious commitment and will to tackle the epidemic in China." He warned that if China fails to follow through it faces a raging epidemic.

"Asia is rapidly catching up to Africa as the region with the largest number of HIV infections in world, but Asia still has a key opportunity to stop the epidemic before it reaches catastrophic proportions," Piot said at the opening ceremony.

"Nowhere is this more true than in China," he said. "Over the next two decades, what happens in China will determine the global burden of HIV/AIDS."

The official number of AIDS cases in China so far is small, considering that the nation has 1.26 billion people.

Health Minister Zhang Wenkang told conference delegates that 1,208 AIDS cases had been recorded by the end of September, and that 641 of those had ended in death. He said the official number of people infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, is 28,133.

But he acknowledged that experts estimate that actual number of HIV infections is more than 600,000. And he said national surveillance data show that the number of infections reported in the first half of this year increased 67 percent over the same period last year. "HIV is gradually spreading from people with high-risk behaviors to the general population," he said.

The Chinese government's campaign against AIDS was welcomed by a man whose own struggle with the disease is followed by thousands on the Internet.

My Final Battle, a diary on the Shanghai website Rongshu.com, has given many Chinese their first glimpses of life with AIDS, which remains a taboo topic in many circles. The 27-year-old author, who uses the pen name Li Jiaming, says he contracted HIV two years ago after getting drunk with a colleague who took him to a brothel.

Li said in a telephone interview that he keeps his identity -- and his condition -- secret from his friends and even his parents because "telling people that I have AIDS could bring me so much trouble and discrimination."

He said he continued to hold a job but that his health was failing and he, like most AIDS patients in China, cannot afford medication. "I'm only an individual. I don't have the right to comment on the action of the government," Li said. "But it's certainly a good thing for the government to act positively and aggressively to combat AIDS. This will help people know more about the disease and will let people know how to protect themselves from contracting AIDS. But, in addition, I hope the society can treat AIDS patients better."

Most official AIDS cases in China are linked to injecting drugs, but a rapidly growing percentage of cases are linked to sex.

"We know from other parts of the world that epidemics among injecting drug users spread explosively and unpredictably -- and as time progresses they move beyond drug injectors to their sexual partners and then wider," Piot said.

Zhang said the government, in addition to education and prevention efforts, would clean up the blood supply by improving oversight of donations. That could include enforcing a law that bans paying for blood.

As many as 100,000 poor farmers are thought to have contracted HIV through their dealings with corrupt blood buyers, who, after extracting the plasma from pooled blood, would inject what remained back into the paid donors.

The four-day conference has more than 2,000 participants -- including government leaders, health administrators, doctors and educators -- from 20 nations.

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