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China faces new AIDS outbreak

A new outbreak of HIV/AIDS has surfaced in northeastern China's Jilin Province where up to 300 villagers could be infected with AIDS after donating blood at government blood stations, villagers and a rights group said yesterday.

"Right now there are three or four villages that have AIDS," an official at Soudeng Township in Jilin city said by phone.

He refused to estimate how many people in the area had been infected by the virus that causes AIDS, but the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy said that up to 300 people could be infected.

"My uncle was infected with AIDS and died yesterday morning. My mother and father also have AIDS," Huang Rui, a villager in Liujiatun village said.

So far in Soudeng some 62 people have died from AIDS, which is believed to have been transmitted from unsanitary government blood stations in the early 1990s.

The outbreak was only confirmed in June, but people had been dying from undetermined diseases starting in 2000, said Wu Shuhuan, a villager in Erdaogou village.

"Up to now seven or eight people have died in our village, they all had donated blood. Our village is pretty poor so a lot of people were donating blood," Wu said.

The government opened up a blood collection station in 1985, but shut it down in 1994, she said, indicating that those with AIDS initially got it from selling blood.

A large number of the estimated up to 840,000 HIV/AIDS patients in China have contracted the disease through tainted blood or unsanitary blood donation stations, with the worst affected areas in central Anhui and Henan Province.

Local officials in Jilin only confirmed the outbreak in Soudeng Township in June this year, and have been testing to see how many people contracted AIDS from selling blood and how many contracted it after coming into contact with those that sold blood, Wu said.
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