Breaking a long public silence, a senior Chinese health official said on Thursday that the nation is facing an AIDS epidemic that is growing twice as fast as has been reported, due in part to the refusal of local officials to take the epidemic seriously.

Deputy Health Minister Yin Dakui also acknowledged for the first time that many Chinese contracted HIV through unsafe methods used to sell their blood, often to companies with ties to local officials or the Chinese military. Yin repeated China's official estimate that 600,000 people were HIV-positive at the end of last year, with about 70 percent of them becoming infected through the use of intravenous drugs. Yin confirmed that some Chinese experts believe as many as 100,000 people were infected by blood-selling, accounting for 17 percent of the total number of people with HIV. International health organizations, however, recently estimated about 1.25 million people are infected with HIV in China. They projected that the figure could balloon to 20 million within 10 years if local officials continue to ignore and cover up the extent of the disease.

Yin's disclosures followed months of government denials of reports in China's state-run newspapers and foreign media about villages in central China where large numbers of farmers sold blood to supplement their meager incomes. The issue has been particularly sensitive due to allegations that local officials encouraged and profited from the blood purchasing market, even after it was officially banned in 1995.

Farmers have been selling their blood across the Chinese countryside since the early 1980s. The market received a boost in 1993, according to one Chinese scientist, after health minister Chen Mingzhan approved a plan to export Chinese blood products. As demand jumped, peasants lined up to sell their blood. Middlemen known as "blood heads" also appeared, buying blood from farmers and selling it to hospitals and blood banks.

Yin provided no figures on those who sold blood to dealers after 1995, apparently because Beijing outlawed the practice that year and maintains it succeeded in wiping it out. Yin did acknowledge that a recent study had found that more than 40 percent of those who sold blood to dealers in Henan province's Wenlou village before 1995 contracted the AIDS virus.

Back to other CDC news for August 24, 2001

Previous Updates | Search the CDC archive