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AIDS Victims Protest In China
by Peter Hacker
365Gay.com Newscenter in Sydney

(November 24, Beijing) AIDS victims in a rural town have staged a loud protest against what they allege is incompetence by the government at ending their suffering.

Several hundred people demonstrated outside the local government office in Chengguan demanding free medicine.

Chengguan is in the central province of Henan. Numerous villages in Henan, some reports say as many as 50, have huge numbers of people suffering from AIDS after botched blood collections in the 1990s left them infected with HIV.

Impoverished villagers regularly sold blood in the 1990s.

In at least one village in the province the HIV rate exceeds 60 per cent.

Dirty needles were regularly reused, spreading the virus. The blood collected was then often pooled, contaminating blood banks kept for transfusions.

To compound the problem, there was no AIDS information available to the people at the time and most did not know the disease could be sexually transmitted.

Until recently China attempted to downplay the number of AIDS cases in the country. But, last week, when it held its first international conference on Aids, the government acknowledged about 600,000 cases nationwide.

Some health experts and one official newspaper say even that number is grossly underestimated.

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