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中国媒体突然大量报道艾滋病(英文)

Chinese Media Suddenly Focus on a Growing AIDS Problem
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

December 17, 2000

BEIJING, Dec. 15 - The official Chinese news media have suddenly started publishing a flurry of blunt articles about the country's burgeoning AIDS problem, touching on topics that were previously considered far too sensitive.

Some articles include outright criticisms of the country's half-hearted AIDS prevention efforts and cite previously unmentionable estimates about the thousands of Chinese peasants - and perhaps millions - who have contracted H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, after selling their blood on the black market.

Until recently, articles about AIDS in China mostly cited official statistics without much comment - statistics that are widely regarded as gross underestimates. According to those statistics, 20,711 people have tested positive for H.I.V. in China and 397 have died of AIDS. But even Chinese health officials estimate privately that there are probably 500,000 Chinese who carry the virus.

And although many earlier articles suggested that the problem was growing in urban areas, they made little mention of the staggering problem in the countryside, hinting that the disease was almost exclusively a problem of addicts and prostitutes.

But that bubble has been burst in the last month as a few relatively high-profile newspapers and magazines have described a raging AIDS epidemic in rural China that local officials had tried to cover up.

In late November, Southern Weekend, an adventurous newspaper run by the Communist Party in Guangdong province, ran a damning exposé of AIDS in several rural counties in Henan province. The article, highly critical of local officials, caused a national sensation and prompted follow-up stories in other news outlets.

While the official count of H.I.V.- infected patients for Henan province is 639, the article estimated that there were in fact more than 10,000 infected people in one rural county alone. Most of those had sold their blood illegally or were the spouses and children of blood-sellers. The "blood heads" who pay poor farmers for their blood tend to use unsterile methods that foster the spread of blood-borne diseases.

Since the Southern Weekend article, other newspapers have jumped in, including two pieces in a supplement to People's Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Party.

"World AIDS Day - Dec. 1 - is a good opportunity to understand the situation of people who live with AIDS," began a commentary in Huadong News, a supplement to People's Daily that is distributed in six eastern provinces. "It is also a chance to come to understand some things that have been hidden. What we understand about H.I.V. is just the tip of the iceberg."

The article acknowledged the "explosive growth" of the virus in some rural areas where the illegal blood trade was common. It mentioned the existence of "AIDS villages," with very high rates of the disease. And it warned about "explosive growth" among workers who migrate from the countryside to the cities if appropriate steps are not taken.

Perhaps more important, it condemned local governments that tried to quash information about the disease. In Henan and other provinces where blood selling is widespread, local officials have routinely harassed doctors who have tried to talk about or study the disease and have even criticized journalists who tried to report about it.

Dr. Gao Yaojie, a retired gynecologist who spoke to a foreign reporter about the huge number of peasants who had become infected in rural Henan, has been harassed by officials there, her colleagues say.