China's Blood Donor AIDS Victims Turn to Suicide

[Dreamer128]

By Juliana Liu
SHUANG MIAO, China (Reuters) - Popping two pills a day to stave off AIDS symptoms helps Chinese wheat farmer Tan Zhiyun delay the inevitable -- suicide.

Tan was diagnosed HIV positive in 2000 along with hundreds of neighbors in the poverty-stricken village of Shuang Miao in the central province of Henan. Some have already killed themselves rather than wait for death.

"Given a choice between hanging myself or eating pesticides, I'd prefer to hang myself," said the 51-year-old, swaddled in four layers of clothing despite the warm spring weather.

"Suicide is my only way. It might be a little sooner or a little later, but I'll have to do it some day," he said, resting on his side next to wife Wang Xianlin, also HIV positive.

The two are among an estimated 900 HIV sufferers in a village of only 3,800 people, about one third of whom had sold blood regularly to buy goods such as color TVs, fertilizer and schooling for their children.

Experts say up to three million people in Henan alone sold their blood to unsanitary clinics, many of them state-sponsored, throughout the 1990s in what they call the worst medically caused HIV epidemic in the world.

But after years of living in the shadows, gagged by village and provincial officials fearful of public scrutiny, China's AIDS victims are demanding recognition and free treatment to make their remaining days more comfortable.

China's leaders, keen to maintain social stability and brisk economic growth, said public health would be a key issue during the annual session of the National People's Congress, or parliament, which opened March 5.

VIGILANCE

Premier Wen Jiabao, burnishing his "Man of the People" image, said the public health system must be strengthened to deal with communicable diseases.

"We need to maintain a high degree of vigilance and take firm and effective measures to control SARS, AIDS, schistomiasis," he told lawmakers.
International health agencies say AIDS could infect 10 million Chinese by 2010 if unchecked, dwarfing the higher-profile SARS and avian flu outbreaks.
Government officials had promised to provide poor HIV sufferers with free effective drugs, free blood tests and free treatment. But peasants living in hundreds of "AIDS villages" in Henan say real benefits have yet to trickle down to them.

With no paved roads or running water, Shuangmiao is a typical Henan village untouched by China's economic juggernaut. Villagers saw the chance to sell blood as their one shot at a better life.

Clinics paid farmers to extract their blood plasma, then pumped the unused components back into the donor from a pool tainted with blood from other people. Blood was returned so that donors could give repeatedly.

More than 1,200 people in Shuangmiao regularly sold their blood for about $5 per visit, said Zhu Jingzhong, an HIV positive farmer who emerged as an informal leader after AIDS hit the village in 2000.

"It was like an atomic bomb went off," he said, puffing on a cigarette and gazing at a dozen children playing in his yard, orphans he had taken in after their parents died of AIDS.

"Villagers started dying at the same time. Some committed suicide when they found out. People stopped buying our vegetables and wheat. Youngsters in the village had a hard time finding marriage partners," he said.

BLACK MARKET DRUGS

Farmer Tan said he was on the verge of committing suicide three months ago when his family bought the retroviral Triomune, made by Indian generic drugs firm Cipla, for about $60 a bottle on the black market.

But family members said they had spent all their savings and even gone into debt to buy the exorbitantly priced drug, which would run out in about five days, prompting Tan to consider suicide again.

Villagers said free boxes of generic retroviral drugs made by Shanghai Desano Biopharmaceutical Co Ltd were handed out with great fanfare by officials last June. But about two-thirds of patients stopped taking medication due to severe side effects, they said.

Activists were outraged, saying Desano's drugs were never tested on humans before being distributed and highlighted the government's incompetence in tackling AIDS in a region where condoms are rare.
"We are just beginning to see that a vast majority of people find the side effects too painful to continue," said Wan Yanhai, director of the Beijing Aizhixing Institute of Health Education, who spent months in jail for daring to speak out about the virus.
A spokeswoman for Desano said human trials were not needed before the drug's January 2003 launch because it was a generic copy. Regulators asked the firm to start clinical tests this year, she said, declining to specify why.

Qi Xiaoqiu, a director general at the Health Ministry's department of disease control, told Reuters the ministry was aware of problems with the free drug and was seeking a solution.

"We do plan to procure foreign-made retrovirals, but that will take some time," he said on the sidelines of the Global AIDS Program launch in Beijing.

But time may be running out for villagers like Tan and 37-year-old Zhu Longwei, once a sturdy farmer who now passes his days lying under a thick pile of blankets.

"I'm deteriorating quickly," he said in a barely audible voice as an intravenous drip delivered a mix of self-bought potions into his body.

© Reuters 2004. All Rights Reserved.

[Melusine]

That is absolutely terrible. Damn...

[wellard]

This is one hell of a sad post.

[The Hierophant]

ARGH! Makes me so f**king angry!
How could a supposedly advanced nation like China be so ridiculously STUPID as to allow clinics to pump untested, pooled blood back into donors!
Idiots! Idiots with government badges!
Seems like it's high time for another round of countryside hangings in The Motherland...

[ryaldin]

Humanity is mired by our ability to make poor decisions even in the most favorable of conditions. Hopefully someone will take the time to learn from them-someday.

[Grojlach]

Originally posted by Melusine: That is absolutely terrible. Damn...

My thoughts exactly.