Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2002. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.

Reuters NewsMedia - Thursday, November 28, 2002
Tamora Vidaillet

State-run newspapers have documented the couple's plans for days, using false names to mask their identities.

Some trumpet the planned marriage as a triumph in the battle against discrimination sufferers of the virus that can cause AIDS undergo. Others suggest society may not be ready to accept the official sanction of such a union.

It is, at least, evidence the government is trying to overcome discrimination that is creating an underclass of HIV sufferers as part of dealing with a disease it regarded until only recently as a scourge of the decadent West.

But as the official -- and some say vastly underestimated -- tally of sufferers hovers around the one million mark, the reality is embodied in the person of 30-year-old Lao Ren.

Lao, who contracted the virus after selling blood a few years ago to boost the income of his struggling rural family, says neighbors of his new Beijing home would flee and customers shun his makeshift foodstall if they knew he had HIV.

"If people knew I had HIV, I would be finished," Lao said in his one-room dwelling furnished with a bed and side table.

"If I was to stop and think about it, the psychological pressure would be too great. The best thing is to get on with it," he said, lesions on his neck masked partially by his collar.

FIRST STEPS

The government acknowledged publicly for the first time only last year that HIV was spreading fast and must be curbed.

It had little choice after domestic media, testing the limits of press freedoms, exposed an explosive spread of HIV in the central province of Henan through illegal blood collection.

Entrepreneurs, some of them government officials, bought blood from poor villages, pooled it in large tubs and extracted the valuable plasma. The blood was then pumped back into the donors.

But some 68 percent of the nearly one million Chinese officially known to have the virus were infected by other means -- through drug and other injections with contaminated needles -- while seven percent contracted it through sex, state television said.

U.N. and Chinese officials say 10 million Chinese could be infected by 2010 if urgent action is not taken. Other experts say the figure, guesswork in a nation that had only 30,000 registered cases in 2001, could already be close.

The government has responded by sanctioning national AIDS conferences and called this month for more international help to curb the disease.

The eastern city of Suzhou has introduced regulations calling for an end to discrimination against HIV sufferers while Guangzhou in the south plans to allow some pharmacies to sell needles freely as way of preventing the spread of HIV among drug users.

"The government is devoting a lot of energy to reducing discrimination and giving more help to sufferers," said Xu Hua, secretary general of the China Foundation for the Prevention of STDs and AIDs.

WAY TO GO

But Chinese experts say much, much more needs to be done.

Open discussion of the disease is largely taboo and activists who have exposed problems related to HIV-tainted blood have been detained.

Health officials say HIV sufferers have every right to get married, but in reality, it depends on local regulations.

HIV sufferers like Lao Ren cannot legally secure jobs in cities if they fail mandatory health tests while sufferers in some parts of the country cannot marry if they have the virus, according to Li Dun, professor at Tsinghua University.

"On the one hand they say don't discriminate against them, on the other you have regulations that do just that," he said.

"I don't think this will be solved quickly. We will push this. Everyone needs to push for this -- the government, the parliament, common people and researchers," he said.

HIV sufferers intent on keeping their secret say changing scores of discriminatory local regulations will not solve an issue likely to remain taboo for years.

"We need to train government cadres to know more about HIV/AIDS, get the media involved and educate people who work in social services," said a second HIV sufferer on condition of anonymity.

"If we don't, the problem will only get worse."
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