Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2000. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
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United Press International - December 7, 2000
The newspaper said officials have tried to cover up Shangcai's soaring AIDS rate with lies and secrecy, triggering an avoidable epidemic in Henan province.
"AIDS is an unusual disease. If news of it leaks out, it can damage not only a patient's name, but the county, or even the reputation of our country," said an official with the Shangcai County Public Health Bureau.
Earlier this year, a Western diplomat was told by a county health worker: "There have been no AIDS cases in Shangcai." Officials have gagged two doctors who tried to raise the alarm, the Telegraph said.
One of the doctors, Prof. Gui Xi'en, reported his concerns to the central government in Beijing last December after he tested 155 former blood donors in a Henan village, Wenlou. He discovered that 96 were HIV positive. Now, Gui and a colleague are not permitted to speak with foreign journalists.
The Telegraph said the cover-up in Henan province is being tested by the most daring Chinese media. One newspaper estimates that almost 10,000 Shangcai villagers are infected with AIDS or the HIV virus that causes it, but the report played down the role of legal government clinics in spreading the disease.
But the report said government officials lie to mask Shangcai's epidemic, even resorting to not telling HIV-infected patients how the disease was spread. As a result, infected patients continue to sell their blood and plasma at crude local "blood stations" and unwittingly infecting their wives, husbands and children.
One couple in Shangcai sold their blood 45 times.
A local health official said peasants in the worst affected area were not going to be tested for HIV unless they requested it, even though infection rates in some area villages are as high as 20 percent.
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