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Release Our Relatives, China AIDS Victims Say
From Reuters:
A group of Chinese HIV/AIDS sufferers appealed on Wednesday for police to release their relatives, detained after trying to complain to Premier Wen Jiabao about a hospital they said spread the HIV virus.
Wen visited Hebei province, next to Beijing, on April 5, and some residents of Shahe in the province’s south hoped to use the rare visit by the top leader to complain about a hospital whose blood transfusions they blame for spreading HIV among them and their families, said their lawyer Jiang Tianyong.
Police detained 11 petitioners at the time and seven or eight remained in detention, said Jiang.
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- April 16, 2008 6:06 PM
HIV/AIDS Rates Rise 45 Percent
The Health Ministry revealed today that new cases of HIV/AIDS in China rose by 45 percent in 2006. Last year China lowered its estimate of infected individuals by about 2,000 people, despite international warnings that the disease was simply being underreported, the Independent reports.
“It’s been hard over the years to discover the number of AIDS patients because of the social stigma,” a ministry spokesman said. The disease is spreading fast in a country where information about Aids has long been suppressed. For many years, Chinese would say HIV/Aids was a disease that affected foreigners, and could be passed through shaking hands or sharing chopsticks.
The government has finally acknowledged that it faces a battle in resolving the rise in HIV/AIDS infections. The disease is now mainly sexually transmitted; before, it had been mostly caused by intravenous drug use.
The United Nations has warned that China could have 10 million cases of HIV by 2010 unless it takes steps to educate the public and fight the epidemic.
Along with the traditional routes of infection, about 70,000 people have been infected by contaminated blood transfusions. Many blood banks in rural China are not controlled by the government and often unsanitary.
In 2006 the government banned organizations or individuals to discriminate against Aids patients or their families. However, the Health Ministry survey found that about 60 percent of city dwellers were “nervous” about contact with HIV-positive people.
Syphilis cases also rose by 24 percent.
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- February 22, 2008 7:34 PM
The Premier’s Visit to China’s Most Infamous AIDS Village – Black and White Cat
Black and White Cat has posted the official Xinhua report about Premier Wen Jiabao’s visit to an AIDS village in Henan Province, together with a post from activist Hu Jia about what really goes on when top leaders visit the area:
Premier Wen Jiabao doesn’t know that the last time he visited, 1,200 police were dispatched to seal off the road to Wenlou from the county town of Shangcai and a large number of local cadres pretended to be villagers welcoming him. Yang Songquan personally made sure that people who were likely to meet Premier Wen would answer his questions in exactly the way the Henan government wanted, without getting a single word wrong. That show of being close to the people was a waste of time and money. As soon as Premier Wen left, the local authorities breathed a sigh of relief; the country’s premier had turned out to be easy to handle. Now, large numbers of Henan police have already been stationed in Wenlou and sealed off key areas. The local government has also put some active villagers with AIDS under house arrest, usually sending two village cadres and two security guards hired by the Shangcai county police for each “troublemaker.” [Full text]

See also a documentary about AIDS in China, To Live is Better than to Die, which Hu Jia mentions in his post:
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- December 3, 2007 9:50 PM
Scientists Reveal Likely Origin Of AIDS In China – Pang Li
From China.org.cn:
A research study done by the National Center for AIDS/STD Control and Prevention has concluded that the AIDS virus in China originated in 1989 with 146 drug addicts found in southwest China’s Yunnan Province.
Wu Zunyou, director of the center, disclosed this information during an AIDS-related meeting held at Tsinghua University. According to Wu, a small segment of the drug-using population in one of Yunnan’s prefectures was found infected with AIDS in 1989.
The prefecture at that time had a population of 1 million. By the end of 2006 the prefecture had 1.1 million residents with twenty thousand, or 2 percent of the total population, infected with the AIDS virus. During these 17 years, AIDS spread beyond Yunnan to the rest of China. [Full Text]
Read also Report: Sex Main Cause of HIV in China by Henry Sanderson, HIV/AIDS discrimination widespread in China–U.N. and China’s Hu presses the flesh with AIDS patients by Reuters.
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- November 30, 2007 5:46 AM
China Says Estimated HIV/AIDS Cases Rise To 700,000 – AFP
From AFP:
China is estimated to have about 700,000 HIV/AIDS cases, with tens of thousands of new infections each year, the government said Thursday, but activists warned the problem was far greater.
“The result of estimates is that at the end of 2007, China will have about 700,000 HIV/AIDS cases, and 85,000 with AIDS,” Health Minister Chen Zhu told a press conference in Beijing.
Chen said there were an estimated 50,000 new HIV infections in 2007, when 20,000 people died from AIDS, figures he described as a slightly better than previous years. [Full Text]
See also “Report: Sex Main Cause of HIV in China” from AP.
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- November 29, 2007 7:06 AM
Video: China’s Blood Sellers – Current.com
Angela Sun, a Current journalist, went to Hebei to investigate blood selling among the villagers which has caused HIV/AIDS to spread in that area. [Original video here]

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- November 20, 2007 8:13 PM
China Starts Revision Of Law Banning Entry Of HIV Carriers – Xinhua
From Xinhua:
China has started revising the current laws and regulations that ban HIV carriers from entering the country, health ministry spokesman Mao Qun’an said on Monday.
At a press briefing in Beijing, he said it took time for China to learn about AIDS. When the country had no idea how HIV/AIDS was transmitted, China issued laws that restricted the entry of HIV carriers.
“According to the transmissive means of HIV/AIDS and our current evaluation on the harmfulness of HIV carriers, we have set to revise laws and regulations that ban HIV carriers’ entry into the country,” Mao said.
But he didn’t say how the laws would be revised. [Full Text]
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- November 12, 2007 5:01 PM
New China HIV Cases Grow To Over 3,000 A Month – Reuters
From Reuters:
China’s new HIV/AIDs cases have accelerated to more than 3,000 a month, with the proportion of cases caused by sexual transmission increasing, state media said on Tuesday.
China recorded 3,223 new infections per month on average between January and October, the official China Daily said on Tuesday, compared with 3,090 cases a month reported by Xinhua news agency for the first half of this year.
Nearly 38 percent of the cases reported in the first half were caused by sexual transmission, a rise from 30 percent last year, the paper quoted Wang Ning, deputy director of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, as saying. [Full Text]
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- November 5, 2007 9:59 PM
HIV Victims Need The Credit Lifeboat, Too – Alessandra Tisot
From South China Morning Post, via China AIDS Survey:
The 17th National Congress gives Chinese leaders a unique opportunity to find ways to make financial services more accessible to the rural poor. That was the goal of one set of proposals already unveiled this year. Such a push is to be applauded, since limited rural access to financial services is a major barrier preventing the weakest from finding opportunities to take part in the mainland’s impressive development.
This harmonious vision of inclusiveness cannot be realised, however, as long as access to these services remains limited for the most vulnerable – including people living with HIV, their families and affected communities. Millions of people affected by HIV are restricted by the loss of security, livelihood options and human development potential. To compensate, Beijing should explore explicit provisions for HIV/Aids in the current thrust to expand rural financial services. [Full Text]
Alessandra Tisot is the deputy country director of the UN Development Programme in China.
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- October 19, 2007 10:09 AM
Official: In Some Parts AIDS Situation ‘Serious’ – Xinhua
From Xinhua via China Daily:
While the prevalence of AIDS in China remains low compared with the total population, the situation is very serious in several provinces affected by drug trafficking and illegal blood donation, senior Chinese AIDS control officials said on Saturday.
China had registered a total of 214,000 HIV cases by July 30 this year, said Hao Yang, deputy director of the AIDS prevention and control office of the State Council during an online interview at Xinhuanet.com.[Full Text]
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- September 29, 2007 8:03 PM
HIV/AIDS Cases Soar In Beijing In First Half Year – Shan Juan
From China Daily:
The number of new HIV/AIDS cases reported in Beijing in the first half of the year was almost as high as the total for 2006, a spokesman for the Beijing Association of STD and AIDS Prevention and Control said Thursday.
Guan Baoying, deputy director of the association, said 563 new cases had been reported in the first six months, taking the total in the capital to more than 4,200.
The number of new HIV/Aids cases being reported in Beijing has been growing by an average of 50 percent a year, he said. [Full Text]
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- September 21, 2007 5:25 AM
Provinces Undermine Beijing’s Goals on AIDS – Maureen Fan
The Washington Post looks at how provinces are failing to implement policies set by the central government to help AIDS patients and stem the spread of the disease:
They say the gap between Beijing’s official position and the practices of local officials is the result of a political system that makes it difficult to impose reform at a grass-roots level. The central government has the means to curb the epidemic, they say, but the control and corruption inherent in a one-party system prevent courts and state-run news media from uncovering abuses.
The stakes are high. Experts fear that inaction by local officials in China is already contributing to spikes in the incidence of HIV/AIDS, which has spread from high-risk groups such as drug users and prostitutes to the larger public. There were 18,543 new cases of HIV reported in the first six months of this year, nearly as many as for all of last year, according to the official New China News Agency. China’s estimate of 650,000 AIDS cases, among a population of 1.3 billion people, is extremely low, domestic and international AIDS groups say. [Full text]
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- September 18, 2007 7:58 PM
China Reports Leap In New HIV/AIDS Cases – Reuters
From Reuters:
China reported 18,543 new cases of HIV/AIDS in the first half of this year, state media said, near the number for the whole of 2006.
Drug abuse was the main cause of new infections, Xinhua news agency quoted Han Mengjie, an official with AIDS Control Work Committee of the State Council, as saying in a report on Saturday.
Han also warned of the danger of the virus spreading to the general public through unsafe sex and the greater migration of the infected population. [Full Text]
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- September 9, 2007 4:29 AM
Sex is Prime Cause of China’s HIV – Jill McGivering
BBC reports on HIV situation in China:
China’s state media says unsafe sex has, for the first time, become the main means of transmission of HIV/Aids, overtaking intravenous drug use. Infected blood transfusions also caused many of the early cases. The news raises fresh concerns that HIV infections are moving from high risk groups to the mainstream population.
China estimates that about 650,000 people are HIV positive – but it is thought that widespread under-reporting makes accurate figures hard to come by….[Full Text]
[Image: Activists are pushing China to change the way it tackles HIV, via BBC]
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- August 20, 2007 6:14 AM
Demography of HIV/AIDS in China – Bates Gill, Yanzhong Huang and Xiaoqing Lu
From Center for Strategic & International Studies website:
… The possible evolution of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in China from localized high-prevalence populations to a more widespread, generalized epidemic poses a critical question for which there have been few good answers. China’s national surveillance system does not adequately scrutinize the general population for HIV, and the Chinese government’s responsiveness to the epidemic, while improving, still lags, especially with respect to certain at-risk populations. This has led some observers to speculate about the long-term spread and impact of the disease.
The challenge of determining the true impact of HIV within the general population in China has been the lack of a reliable, comprehensive surveillance and reporting system, coupled with the lack of an effective referral chain within the Chinese healthcare system. However, over the past few years, more information has become available about specific, at-risk populations. Likewise, the national surveillance system is expanding every year. [Full Text]
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- July 31, 2007 9:55 AM