Wall Street Journal - August 31, 2001
Leslie Chang, Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

Helene Gayle, director of a center studying HIV, sexually transmitted diseases and tuberculosis under the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was in Beijing to share with the government findings from a recent study on the spread in China of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. The Atlanta-based CDC, which is funded by the U.S. government, recently conducted the two-week fact-finding mission at Beijing's invitation.

"Now there's a real recognition [among Chinese officials] that this is a major issue ... and also a growing commitment to tackling the issue," said Dr. Gayle. "This is a country that can make a difference, before it's too late."

Those were rare upbeat words for a government that until recently has all but ignored its AIDS problem publicly -- and been widely criticized for it. Last week, the government admitted for the first time that it was on the verge of an epidemic, and that denial on the part of some officials had aided the spread of HIV. Deputy Health Minister Yin Dakui told reporters that the number of new HIV cases in the first six months of this year jumped 67% from a year earlier. The official estimate of the number of people infected by HIV is 600,000.

Under the CDC's assessment, which was conducted about a month ago, its doctors toured four provinces where they visited hospitals, clinics for people with sexually transmitted diseases, and blood-donation centers. They met with doctors, patients, drug users, prostitutes and homosexuals. The group didn't collect actual data but gathered information with an eye toward setting up future collaborations in areas like monitoring, education, and working to ensure a clean blood supply and syringes.

Dr. Gayle noted that much work lies ahead. AIDS awareness is low, especially outside large cities, "not only among the general population but also among health-care workers," she said. And most efforts to fight the disease in China have been small-scale pilot projects, such as programs to train health workers or educate prostitutes that operate in only a single county.

"What is occurring are small pilot activities ... that aren't large enough to significantly slow the spread of HIV," Dr. Gayle said. She said officials should focus on incorporating such projects into the existing health-care network rather than building them anew, and also suggested that different ministries coordinate efforts to fight the disease. Both are tall orders in a government marked by bureaucratic infighting and poor coordination between the central and local governments.

China's huge population also works against it, since infection rates of even a few percentage points can translate into a large epidemic. "You don't need percentage numbers like you have in Botswana to have staggering prevalence," Dr. Gayle said. "There is a window of opportunity to keep it from becoming a generalized epidemic. I don't think it's a decade. I think we're talking about a few years."

Write to Leslie Chang at leslie.chang@wsj.com1.

010831
WJ010806

Copyright ©1990, 2000. ÆGIS. All materials appearing on ÆGIS are protected by copyright as a collective work or compilation under U.S. copyright and other laws and are the property of ÆGIS, or the party credited as the provider of the content. Feedback/Contact Us.