AEGiS-WSJ: BEIJING -- A recent parliamentary bill to criminalize spreading the AIDS virus highlights how a virulent mix of public panic and populism is hurting China's AIDS sufferers -- and detracting from efforts to fight the disease.

BEIJING -- A recent parliamentary bill to criminalize spreading the AIDS virus highlights how a virulent mix of public panic and populism is hurting China's AIDS sufferers -- and detracting from efforts to fight the disease.

Last week, two groups of deputies proposed bills that would make knowingly spreading the AIDS virus a criminal offense. Under one of them, violators would face between seven and 15 years in prison or even life imprisonment in serious cases, according to local reports. The bills were the latest in a series, many already on the books in provinces and cities across China, that seek to control the spread of AIDS largely through circumscribing the lives of those who suffer from it.

AIDS activists and doctors fear the new laws will worsen discrimination, discourage people from getting tested for AIDS -- only those who "knowingly" spread the disease will be punished -- and feed the myth that the disease can be eradicated through punishing the few rather than educating the many.

They also worry that China is losing a huge opportunity to stem the spread of the disease. Because AIDS is in a relatively early phase here, experts say moving aggressively to teach prevention could be very successful.

Song Xishan, the father of a boy, now 19, who contracted the disease three years ago through a blood transfusion, recalls that visiting health officials insisted on speaking with him in the yard outside his house because they feared infection.

"Now they want to legislate to limit personal freedom. What sort of a law is that?" asks Mr. Song, who says his son was asked to leave school. "Do these legislators represent the people? There are more and more people with AIDS. Do they not represent us?"

Unusual for China, the impetus for the latest legislation comes not from above -- the Ministry of Health, in fact, has emphasized patients' rights and the voluntary nature of AIDS testing -- but from below: The public, which knows very little about the disease, is clamoring for the government to take action.

The recent lifting of a ban on AIDS-related reporting in the state-run media appears to have fed a public panic through alarmist reports that China is on the verge of an epidemic. The government recently projected that the number of people infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, could rise to 10 million by 2010 from an estimated 500,000 now without preventive measures.

"It's really an expression of fear more than anything else," says Emile Fox, country program adviser for UNAIDS, the United Nations agency coordinating AIDS activities, in Beijing. "Lawmakers are under pressure to do something, and this is the easiest way to appear to be doing something."

The southwestern city of Chengdu passed a law that goes into effect in May that would require people working in hotels, restaurants, travel agencies, public baths, swimming pools and beauty salons to be tested annually for AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, with those testing positive required to stop working. Under that law, people infected with any such diseases are also forbidden from marrying. While the law's recent passage excited vigorous debate -- with some advocating patients' rights and others worrying the legislation would scare away investment -- its contents echoed similar laws already on the books in other cities and little-noticed until now. Many of the laws originally targeted a broad range of sexually transmitted diseases and are now being amended to include or emphasize AIDS.

The laws allow for intrusion and sometimes coercion in almost every aspect of life. Beijing, for example, calls on employers and individuals to report any "suspected AIDS patients" to local health authorities, and calls for mandatory testing of "prostitutes, their clients or possible spreaders of AIDS" who are apprehended by police or the courts. Shenyang, in China's industrial northeast, says that AIDS patients should undergo segregated medical treatment, which can if necessary be "forcibly implemented by the public security authorities." The province of Hebei bans people with sexually transmitted diseases from "joining the military, entering school, getting married or ... working in the child-care, food-related or service industries."

Calls to criminalize the transmission of AIDS also are picking up wider support. In 1997, the country's criminal law was amended to punish prostitutes and their customers who knowingly spread sexually transmitted diseases with up to five years' imprisonment, detention or unspecified fines. The law made no specific mention of AIDS, but in September, at a national conference on AIDS legislation, three Shanghai lawyers advising the city government proposed amending the law to include AIDS.

The actions in China are at odds with a central government that is moving closer to international norms on patients' rights. A document about treatment of AIDS patients issued by the Ministry of Health in 1998 lists "maintenance of confidentiality and the guarantee of individual legal rights" as one of its guiding principles. The document stresses the rights of those with AIDS or HIV to work, attend school, obtain medical treatment and participate in social activities, and says only that AIDS patients should delay marriage and those infected with HIV should "seek a medical opinion" before getting married. The ministry issued another document in November stressing that HIV tests prior to marriage or pregnancy should be voluntary.

"What the Ministry of Health wants is a protective law, a tolerant law. But what society wants is a punishment law," says Wan Yanhai, an activist who runs the Beijing-based AIDS Action Project, which spreads information about the disease within China.

A burst of investigative reporting late last year fueled the drive to legislate against people simply for having AIDS. Domestic newspapers first carried in-depth reports about the spread of AIDS in impoverished villages in Henan province through the illegal purchase and pooling of villagers' blood. The stories then turned to the more general issue of AIDS in China.

Many of the reports were highly alarmist. A recent TV documentary, for example, featured a technician who purportedly contracted the disease while working in Thailand, where he was repairing a sewing machine that had been used by an HIV-infected factory worker. The report perpetuated two common myths: that AIDS is a foreigners' disease and that anything that has come into contact with an AIDS sufferer is infectious.

"To teach people to use condoms would be so much more useful than these laws," says Zhang Ke, a doctor at Beijing's Youan Hospital, which has treated more than 300 HIV-infected patients in the past two years. "This is a backward step."

Restriction and Discrimination

Excerpts from Chinese provincial and city regulations on AIDS patients and people infected with the HIV virus:

Beijing City: 'The corpse of a person with AIDS or infected with the HIV virus must, under the supervision of local or county health authorities... be cremated on the spot and not be transported out of the city.'

Hebei Province: 'Those with sexually transmitted diseases who have not been cured cannot join the military, enter school, recruit workers to get married, cannot obtain permission to have a child, cannot obtain permission to have a child, cannot work in child care, food-related, or service industries, etc., and those already in those fields must be transferred.'

Dalian City: 'Those diagnosed as being infected with the HIV virus can work in appropiate jobs... The work unit and neighborhood committee should coordinate with health authorities to limit the scope of their movement.'

Source: WSJ research

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