They saw blood as a way of making easy money leading to of thousands of impoverish peasants being infected with AIDS, a plight the Chinese government did their best to conceal.
On March 14, 2007, Gao Yaojie, a doctor from China, finally received a Human Rights Award for her help in exposing an AIDS epidemic in the Henan province of China, where an estimated 300,000 people were infected with the virus after taking part in government sponsored blood selling schemes in the 1990’s.
Dr. Gao had been put under house arrest in China following her appearance in a documentary highlighting the scandal, the details of which the Chinese government were keen to suppress.
The Henan province, in rural north China, was just one of many areas where commercial companies, known colloquially as ‘bloodheads,’ offered the poor Chinese peasants of the area a chance to make some easy money.
Life is very hard for these farmers, as in recent years the traditional subsistence economy has been eroded by modern reforms. Education and healthcare are no longer free, and many of these landowners find it virtually impossible to make ends meet.
These poverty-stricken people were offered what seemed like a good deal. They would sell their blood and, when the plasma was extracted, the remaining blood cells would be re-injected back into them. But the red blood cells that were re-injected to them were from a tainted pool and had been collected using unhygienic equipment. This blood had been mixed with the corpuscles of other donors in batches that were infected with HIV. As a result, hundreds of thousands of donors were then infected, causing an AIDS epidemic in the area.
In Henan, this blood-buying had been organised by the province's health department, who were quick to see a way of making big money for the province. They saw blood as a way of making easy revenue and even sent a blood-selling delegation to America in 1994, promoting their product (blood) as cheap and the Henan province as HIV-free.
Medical centres were ordered to focus on blood collection and even military units, coal mines and factories jumped on the bandwagon, setting up their own collection stations. At one point there were over 200 legal collection stations.
Infected peasants soon found themselves too weak to work, calling their suffering the ‘strange illness’ or the ‘nameless fever’. They also began to die, some in agony, without really understanding what was happening to them as the government veiled the scandal in a cloak of silence.
But with whole communities falling prey to the disease, it was impossible for the silence to go on forever. In 2003, the Chinese government began giving free drugs to rural patients who had contracted HIV through their cash for blood schemes. And while this may have gone some way to stemming the tide of AIDS related deaths in the area (United Nations estimates put this number at around 31,000 in China), for the infected farmers and their families the nightmare continues.
In a country like China there is not even the thought of reparation, or of suing the government for their role in infecting the people of Henan, and there has never been any pursuit for culpability for what happened, though as Dr. Gao points out, ‘it was a crime, pure and simple.’
But the most worrying thing about this epidemic is Beijing’s determination to underplay the extent of AIDS in China, meaning that the disease is free to spread through communities at will. People from Henan still believe that their province is AIDS free.
The official number of AIDS cases in China at the end of 2006 was between 540,000 and 760,000, although experts believe that the real numbers are much higher. As far back as 2000, officials warned that if China did not take effective measures, it would soon have the highest number of AIDS-infected people in the world.
