Chinese Villagers See Tragic Payoff to Selling Blood

BEIJING â€”  They came here looking for treatment, they said, some way to get better, feel stronger. But they also came to talk about the scourge that has turned their lives into burdens, children into orphans and their village into what one doctor calls a “combat zone.â€�

The scourge is AIDS. And it is laying waste to small pockets of China’s most populous province, Henan, among poor farmers who knew little or nothing about the disease when they were first infected through tainted blood. Nothing, that is, until people started getting sick and dying.

Now “everyone knows� about the disease, said one AIDS sufferer in her 50s. “It’s incurable,� she said. “It’s super-cancer.�

The woman, too afraid to give her name, was one of several people from Henan who spoke with foreign journalists in Beijing on Wednesday about the AIDS ordeal and official inaction. They came to make a last-ditch appeal for help, carrying a letter that accused local leaders of doing practically nothing to address the problem.

Even as some local authorities in Henan try to prevent word from spreading, information about the province’s growing AIDS crisis is leaking out to the domestic and international media.

The attention has turned a spotlight on how a disease that has devastated large swaths of Africa and the West is now coursing through the world’s most populous nation, largely unchecked by education, good medical care or any of the methods that other countries have used to stem the tide.

Health officials estimate that China had about 500,000 people infected with AIDS in 1999. But that number could be far higher now that stories like those emerging from Henan are coming to light.

In the AIDS-stricken villages of Henan, infection rates are reportedly as high as 65%. Rural victims contract the disease primarily through selling their blood.

It’s a lucrative activity in China’s vast countryside. The money, as little as it may seem to someone in the West, is a bonanza for many peasants, helping pay for new homes, tuition fees and local taxes.

“They told us it was harmless to sell blood, so we believed them,� said the fiftysomething woman, a resident of Wenlou village in Shangcai county, one of the hardest-hit in Henan. “They paid us 40 renminbi [about $5] each time.�

“If you put all the blood I sold and put it into a barrel, you wouldn’t be able to lift it,� said the older of two men from Wenlou who was in the group that traveled to Beijing.

Many of the blood-buying stations, which proliferated throughout Henan in the 1980s, were sponsored by the government, through the local public health authority. Others were illegal operations set up by residents looking for a quick way to make money by reselling the blood to institutional buyers.

But unsafe blood collection--especially the practice of pumping pooled blood back into the villagers’ bodies after the valuable plasma had been siphoned off--meant that the AIDS virus, once introduced into the pool, almost instantly found its way into dozens of new victims.

In the mid-’90s, the government in Henan banned the blood stations as reports of AIDS began to emerge. But the damage was already done.

Dozens of residents of Wenlou village have since died of AIDS, said a local doctor contacted by telephone. “I work in a combat zone,� said the doctor, who gave his surname as Liu. “I can’t cure my patients.�

Residents say Shangcai county officials have tried to hush up the magnitude of the tragedy.

In the letter they brought with them to Beijing, written by village leaders, the Wenlou residents accused the authorities of setting up a sham clinic that did next to nothing to help stricken farmers. It was stocked with medicine and spruced up only to fool higher-level inspectors into thinking that something was being done, the villagers said.

The residents traveled hundreds of miles to reach the Chinese capital, where they said Wednesday that they were desperate for better treatment. But such treatment is almost certainly out of reach financially; drug “cocktails� like the ones used effectively in the West are rare and not affordable here.

The Wenlou group included the two men and also two women, all of whom have contracted the disease, as well as three boys, at least one of whom was made an orphan by it.

“I’m 36. I have three kids. My wife is dying,� said one man, who found out three years ago that he is sick with AIDS. “My question is, who will be responsible for this?�

He places the blame squarely on the government, which had encouraged the blood donations. Signs on stations bore such slogans as “It is a glory to donate your blood. Help the invalid and save the dying.�

But getting the authorities to take responsibility is difficult.

Gao Yaojie knows that. A retired doctor, the 74-year-old resident of Henan’s capital, Zhengzhou, has been working to bring relief to places like Shangcai county.

This week, the Global Health Council is due to give Gao its prestigious Jonathan Mann Award for Global Health and Human Rights, which carries with it a $20,000 prize to be presented in Washington.

But the Henan provincial health department, Gao’s former employer, blocked her from attending, apparently for fear that she would further spread the word about Henan’s AIDS crisis and make the government look bad. The department called her a tool of “anti-China forces,� Gao said.

Her work has exposed the plague now taking such a huge toll on some of Henan’s villages. In Xincai county, another badly stricken area, almost every household in one township of 2,000 farmers has been hit by AIDS, Gao said.

“They look like famine victims in Africa--just bags of bones,� she said. “No one can imagine that people can look like that unless you see them with your own eyes.�

One Western health expert in Beijing said the Chinese government and Henan authorities in particular are finally asking for help. But with the slow pace of change in China, the outlook is not good.

“There’s nothing putting a brake on it,� the expert said.