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ILoveNewYork
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加入时间: 2007/01/17
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作者：ILoveNewYork 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
Jan 18th 2007 | SHUANGMIAO, HENAN PROVINCE
From The Economist print edition
Tens of thousands of lives devastated. Not a single official held to account
WALKING through the village of Shuangmiao, Zhu Longwei points out the houses of families unaffected by HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. They are few and very conspicuous: imposing grey-walled structures towering over clusters of old dilapidated homes. Mr Zhu, whose wife has HIV, is uneasy about escorting a journalist in broad daylight. For years, Shuangmiao has been off limits to the press. Officials—whose negligence and greed created Shuangmiao's HIV nightmare—routinely detain and expel any reporters they find.
The village, and many like it, is a victim of China's biggest public-health scandal of recent decades. In the early 1990s, local officials encouraged peasants to supplement their meagre incomes by selling blood plasma. Many Chinese are loth to give blood, believing it might weaken them. But the peasants were told they would get the blood back once the plasma had been removed. They were not told of the enormous risks. There would be no tests for HIV. The blood would be re-infused after being pooled with other donors'. So any virus would spread.
The United Nations estimates that at the end of 2005 there were 55,000 commercial blood and plasma donors infected with HIV in China. Most contracted the virus before the central government began tightening controls over the business in the mid-1990s. One Chinese AIDS expert, Zhang Ke, reported in 2004 that the figure for Henan province in central China, to which Shuangmiao belongs, could be more than 170,000. Dr Zhang estimated that a further 130,000 in Henan got the virus from transfusions in hospitals.
Having tried to play down its HIV problem, and suppress news coverage and public discussion about it, China decided four years ago to try a little openness. This was prompted by the inept handling of an outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, which showed how official attempts to maintain secrecy about the spread of infectious diseases could simply make things worse. But officials in Henan, as well as some in Beijing, remained just as determined to suppress news of what had happened in villages such as Shuangmiao in the 1990s.
Victims and activists say that not a single official has been punished for his role in the plasma trade, during the height of which even police and army units set up plasma-buying stations to boost their incomes. Nor do they know of any doctor who has been punished for giving patients infected blood. To make money, hospitals at that time often prescribed unnecessary transfusions. Many victims and activists resent Li Changchun, then Henan's Communist Party chief and now China's eighth-highest ranking leader, for not intervening sooner. They also blame Li Keqiang, his successor in Henan, first as provincial governor and then as party chief, for allowing the cover-up. Mr Li, now party leader of Liaoning province in the north-east, is tipped for promotion to the Politburo later this year.
New regulations on reporting in China by the foreign press may help to shed more light. The rules, which took effect on January 1st and are intended to facilitate coverage of the Olympic Games in Beijing in August 2008, mean resident correspondents no longer require government approval for reporting trips in the provinces. Mr Zhu and several other villagers in Shuangmiao watched in surprise as a group of local officials trying to stop your correspondent from interviewing him apologised and retreated after an intervention by the foreign ministry in Beijing.
But few expect justice to be meted out soon. In the provincial capital, Zhengzhou, Gao Yaojie, a 79-year-old retired doctor (pictured above), who seven years ago was instrumental in exposing the extent of Henan's HIV infection, says she is even worried that someone might try to kill her. Dr Gao, who now plays a big part in private relief efforts for Henan's HIV carriers, believes her telephone is tapped. Her books on Henan's “AIDS villages” are banned in the province, she says. When visiting the villages, she stays in cheap lodgings where staff are less likely to report her presence to the authorities.
Victims complain of continuing pressure to stay quiet. Li Xige, an activist who says she contracted HIV from a transfusion during a caesarean operation, was placed under house arrest last month in her hometown of Ningling, a few kilometres from Shuangmiao. She had angered the authorities by protesting outside the health ministry in Beijing in July, calling for redress for dozens of local women similarly infected. The health ministry invited her to discuss the issue, but when she turned up for the meeting she was detained in the ministry compound by Ningling officials and escorted back to Henan.
It is not just local officials who are sensitive. The party's propaganda department, which is under the supervision of Li Changchun (the former Henan chief), is just as prickly. Yan Lianke, a well-known writer who wrote a semi-fictional novel based on visits to an AIDS village in Henan, says his work was banned in a secret order issued by the propaganda department and the government's General Administration of Press and Publication as soon as it reached bookshops a year ago.
Mr Yan says that he had even deleted some details of official involvement in the blood business. The publisher, in Shanghai, submitted a court claim in September arguing that it was no longer bound by some of its contractual obligations, including a donation of 50,000 yuan ($6,400) to the victims. The book, said the claim, had “harmed the country's reputation”. The court's decision is awaited.
In Henan, the authorities may be hoping that time is on their side. Of Shuangmiao's roughly 3,000 people, villagers say more than 500 have contracted HIV. Of these, more than 200 have died. The government began distributing free anti-retroviral drugs in Shuangmiao and nearby villages in 2004, but villagers complain of bad side-effects and growing resistance to the medication. After your correspondent's departure, local officials called on Zhu Longwei. He was not to give any more interviews, they said, or he would have to “bear the consequences”. Mr Zhu says he is undeterred. Few will be so bold.
作者：ILoveNewYork 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
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 Blood debts -- ILoveNewYork - (6398 Byte) 2007-1-20 周六, 12:15 (936 reads)
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