Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2005. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2005. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Reuters NewMedia - December 14, 2005
Chinese President Hu Jintao made an unprecedented visit to AIDS patients in a Beijing hospital in November 2004, the eve of World AIDS Day, urging "the whole society to phase out discrimination and estrangement towards them".
Xiao Wei and Lao Ji (pseudonyms) were among those who met Hu, with state television repeatedly showing footage of the meeting without covering up their faces, the China Youth Daily said.
Neighbours and acquaintances back in their village homes in the northern province of Shanxi, where they were infected with HIV in the 1990s through blood selling schemes, have made their life miserable ever since, the newspaper said.
"Local officials came to ask Xiao Wei's landlord to expel his family lest the whole village get infected," it said.
Lao Ji's 11-year-old daughter, who has not contracted HIV, had been isolated by schoolmates and mocked by other children. Villagers even don't allow chickens raised by the family to leave their backyard, it said.
"I cannot forgive them. It's as though we've been sentenced to death by the villagers," Lao Ji's wife, who has not been infected by the virus, was quoted as saying.
China has stepped up the fight against HIV-AIDS in recent years after initially being slow to acknowledge its threat, but public fear and ignorance make the battle an uphill one.
Even among better-educated urban dwellers, nearly 60 percent would be "nervous" to have contact with HIV positive people in public, Xinhua news agency has quoted a Health Ministry survey as saying.
China says it has 840,000 HIV carriers, but experts estimate a much higher figure, with perhaps one million people infected in the central province of Henan alone in a botched blood-selling scheme in mid-1990s.
The government aims to keep the number of cases under 1.5 million by 2010, a number sharply lower than the World Health Organisation projection of 10 million if nothing is done to prevent the disease's spread.
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