HEALTH-CHINA: In Sudden Turnabout, Govt Admits AIDS a Problem

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Antoaneta Bezlova

BEIJING, Dec 4 2002 (IPS) - China, long in denial of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the country, looks set to finally deal with the problem squarely.

A series of authoritative studies showing the socio-economic impacts of the deadly disease on China appears to have finally persuaded authorities, who attach paramount importance to economic growth, to pay more attention to the epidemic sweeping the country.

If the recent spate of publicity and high-profile education campaigns on HIV/AIDS is any indication, Beijing looks willing and ready to face its AIDS problem seriously, after years of ignoring what it considered a taboo subject.

China marked World AIDS Day on Sunday with the announcement it was sending one million students to the countryside amid a month-long propaganda blitz to warn peasants of the AIDS threat.

In a belated attempt to curb the spread of the epidemic, Beijing also began airing a series of TV documentaries on what the disease is all about, how it spreads and how to prevent it.

The official Xinhua News Agency said the series would be broadcast over 1,000 local television stations – reaching about half the country’s 1.3 billion people.

Beijing also announced that it will lift tough restrictions on the advertising of condoms next year. China has banned the promotion of any sex-related products since 1989 and there are few condom-vending machines in a country which last year produced 2.4 billion condoms.

”The fight against HIV/AIDS has gone beyond the confines of hospitals and clinics,” the English-language China Daily said on the eve of World AIDS Day. ”It is now a delicate social issue that needs joint efforts from all sectors of society.”

This dramatic display of openness marks a shift in attitudes towards the disease in the world’s most populous country. For years, Chinese officials have dismissed reports about the risk of full-blown epidemic as exaggerated and regarded the subject as embarrassing.

Health activists were frequently detained and all news on the spread of the disease were promptly suppressed.

In June, Beijing all but rejected a United Nations report warning that the country was on the brink of an ”explosive” AIDS epidemic and wasn’t doing enough to prevent it. The report said that 10 million would be infected with AIDS by 2010.

What lies behind China’s overnight reversal of policy of neglect towards the epidemic is its fear that if left unchecked the disease would reduce China’s GDP and wipe out many of its social and economic gains of the past few years.

A series of commanding studies on AIDS in China with pragmatic economic arguments has forced the government to take the most dire forecasts on board. An AIDS epidemic could shatter China’s comfortable predictions about its economic future, foreign and Chinese experts say.

Writing in the latest edition of Foreign Affairs, U.S. demographer Nicholas Eberstadt warned that in terms of absolute numbers, the centre of the global HIV/AIDS crisis might easily shift in the coming generation to Eurasia – Asia plus Russia.

Eberstadt has drawn up three scenarios for the spread of HIV/AIDS. In the case of a mild epidemic, with adult prevalence rates reaching 1.5 percent, 21 million people could die in India and 19 million in China in the next twenty five years.

In the intermediate epidemic scenario, which assumes infection rates as high as five percent in India and 3.5 percent in China, the death toll could reach 56 million and 40 million respectively.

For China even a mild epidemic would cut projected growth in output per worker by half. Under the most pessimistic projection Chinese productivity would actually decline in the next 25 years and the population growth would shrink.

China’s home-based studies have come to similar gloomy projections.

Even relying on an optimistic scenario, the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and the Ministry of Health recently predicted that AIDS could cut China’s gross domestic product growth by 22.5 billion yuan (2.7 billion U.S. dollars) over the next decade and drag some 20 million people into absolute poverty.

Up until now, the government has been sluggish in responding to the problem because it believed the disease was contained within localised pools of infections and restricted to groups it considers low priority – drug addicts, homosexuals and professional blood sellers.

But now experts warn that the disease is on the point of breaking out into the general population. ”The experience in all other countries is that when you have sub-groups like that with very high prevalence, they do interact with the general population at some point,” said Siri Tellier, Beijing representative of the United Nations Population Fund.

Beijing now acknowledges one million cases of HIV and AIDS, up from 600,000 last year and its July estimates of 850,000 HIV cases, of which 200,000 might have progressed to AIDS.

Other groups suggest that the total may be even higher.

The U.S. intelligence community estimates that China has one to two million people with HIV.

Behind China’s new willingness to deal with a previously ignored problem is also Beijing’s need for foreign money and assistance.

This year the newly-established Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria is providing the country with a 54.7 million U.S. dollars for TB and malaria control but has rejected China’s application for an HIV/AIDS grant.

UN officials say China’s application was unsuccessful because it failed to demonstrate that in the fight against AIDS, Beijing is ready to cooperate with all sectors of civic society, including NGOs and those living with AIDS.

Should China comply with the Global Fund’s conditions, the government would be elegible to re-apply for loans with the Fund.

HEALTH-CHINA: In Sudden Turnabout, Govt Admits AIDS a Problem

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Antoaneta Bezlova

BEIJING, Dec 4 2002 (IPS) - The Chinese government, long in denial of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the country, looks set to finally deal with the problem squarely.
(more…)

HEALTH-CHINA: In Sudden Turnabout, Govt Admits AIDS a Problem

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Antoaneta Bezlova

BEIJING, Dec 4 2002 (IPS) - China, long in denial of the HIV/AIDS
(more…)