By Joe McDonald/AP
Working against a government that has neglected thousands of citizens who are HIV positive, Dr. Gao Yaojie has led a one-woman crusade to help mostly poor farmers, who contracted the disease through the country’s blood-buying industry.
For her activism, Gao was invited to the United States to accept the Jonathan Mann Award for Health and Human Rights, given by the Global Health Council. Officials at her former hospital in the central city of Zhengzhou in Henan province, however, have refused to approve her passport application, a step required for government employees.
“They are afraid they’ll lose their jobs if I publicize the situation of AIDS in China,” Gao, 74, said by telephone from Zhengzhou.
Blood-buying in Henan in the mid-1990s is believed to have infected thousands of people, many of them poor farmers, with the AIDS virus. Operators often used dirty needles. Blood from dozens of sellers was pooled and put into a “huge centrifuge,” where it was spun to separate the desired plasma. Sellers then received replenishment from the leftover red blood cell fraction. That meant that a donor carrying the AIDS virus could quickly infect others.
Three villagers from Henan who contracted AIDS from blood sales came to Beijing this week to publicize the epidemic. They asked not to be identified for fear of inviting government anger.
One, a middle-aged woman, said she began selling blood in the 1980s, though she didn’t realize she had contracted AIDS until after their village clinic stopped buying in 1996.
“We sold blood to pay the local taxes, and also to support our kids through school and make a living,” she said. “If they had told us that it could cause AIDS, nobody would ever sell their blood.”
She said the clinic paid her 40 yuan ($5) each time she sold blood. But she didn’t describe the procedure or how much blood was taken.
After blood-buying stopped, the villagers said at least one clinic official was punished with a 200,000 yuan ($24,000) fine. They said none of the sick had been compensated.
“My wife is dead. And I have three children to raise. Nobody cares about us,” said another villager, a middle-aged man.
Much of the blood-buying in China took place in Henan, said Mo Lixia, an official at the State Family Planning Commission in Beijing. Henan is a densely populated rural province about 400 miles south of Beijing.
China has since outlawed blood sales, but officials are accused of trying to conceal the extent of AIDS infection. China officially reports 20,000 people with the virus or full-blown AIDS, but state media acknowledge that experts put the true number at more than 600,000.
Gao said hospital administrators criticized her for talking to the The New York Times last year, and called the Global Health Council an “anti-China force.”
Gao’s award is to be accepted instead by Dr. Wan Hanhai, a Chinese AIDS activist who lives in Los Angeles, according to the Global Health Council. The award is named for the late Dr. Jonathan Mann, an anti-AIDS activist and epidemiologist who worked in Africa. In a statement announcing the award, the Global Health Council called Gao an “outspoken crusader for the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of poor farmers with HIV in China.”
Gao said health officials have retracted their criticism of her for talking to a foreign reporter, but still refuse to let her go to Washington to collect the award.
“I’m 74 years old. I don’t have much energy to argue with them,” she said. |
