It is rare for a foreign doctor to get to China’s rural areas, where its AIDS epidemic was born and takes a horrible toll. But recently, two nurses and I ventured into a poor farming area, Nizui in Hubei Province, as part of a Medecins Sans Frontières(MSF) team to visit the Liu family and evaluate their 7-month-old baby. The child was the size of a two month old, but his eyes held the gaze of an 80-year-old man long acquainted with extreme suffering. The baby was dying of AIDS. His parents, aunts, and uncles were also HIV-positive.
The Liu family is one of thousands of poor farming families in China’s interior who contracted HIV through contaminated blood donations during the 1990’s, when under-regulated for-profit blood banking companies reused needles and transferred blood from infected donors to clean donors after extracting the plasma.
The Chinese Health Ministry recently put the total number of HIV/AIDS cases at 840,000, although most experts believe that the true number is much higher. Some believe that by 2010, the number of infected Chinese may reach 10 million.
It is rare for a foreign doctor to get to China’s rural areas, where its AIDS epidemic was born and takes a horrible toll. But recently, two nurses and I ventured into a poor farming area, Nizui in Hubei Province, as part of a Medecins Sans Frontières(MSF) team to visit the Liu family and evaluate their 7-month-old baby. The child was the size of a two month old, but his eyes held the gaze of an 80-year-old man long acquainted with extreme suffering. The baby was dying of AIDS. His parents, aunts, and uncles were also HIV-positive.
The Liu family is one of thousands of poor farming families in China’s interior who contracted HIV through contaminated blood donations during the 1990’s, when under-regulated for-profit blood banking companies reused needles and transferred blood from infected donors to clean donors after extracting the plasma.
The Chinese Health Ministry recently put the total number of HIV/AIDS cases at 840,000, although most experts believe that the true number is much higher. Some believe that by 2010, the number of infected Chinese may reach 10 million.