Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2002. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
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Wall Street Journal - October 18, 2002
Leslie Chang, Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
The central and Henan provincial governments will jointly invest "at least" $4 million for drugs to treat several thousand people with AIDS in the central Chinese province, according to a person familiar with the plan, who said the final figure is still being discussed. The medicines will include both domestically made generic versions of the so-called AIDS cocktail, production of which the government recently approved, and on-patent versions purchased from multinational drug companies.
The drugs will be distributed to Henan farm villages where unsanitary blood-buying operations in the mid-1990s spread the disease widely. It may seem a paltry and piecemeal approach, in light of the scale of China's AIDS crisis. The government acknowledges that one million people nationwide are infected with the virus that causes AIDS, while outside estimates put the figure even higher. The collapse of health-care funding in rural China, where the disease is concentrated, has left many towns and villages unable to provide even basic medical needs.
Still, the effort represents the government's first significant AIDS program, after two years of expressions of concern but little action. Only about 100 people in China are now taking the AIDS cocktail, a combination of drugs that can inhibit the spread of the virus but which, at as much as $4,000 for a year's supply, is out of reach for all but a handful of patients.
The Henan plan provides clues on how the government aims to confront the growing medical burden of AIDS. Surveys have shown that HIV prevalence is rising among intravenous drug-users and prostitutes. But the government plan focuses only on poor farmers who contracted the disease through blood-selling.
The same group is also the focus of the government's application for a $96 million grant from the Geneva-based Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. The application, a copy of which was obtained by The Wall Street Journal, says the funds would be devoted to seven central provinces where illegal blood-buying was most rampant. The money would go to AIDS prevention, education and treatment, first focusing on 56 of the worst-hit counties in those provinces.
Write to Leslie Chang at leslie.chang@wsj.com
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