Knowledge
and awareness of AIDS and HIV transmission in China is still low, even in
big cities like Shanghai, according to a survey released Friday.
More than 6,000 people in six Chinese cities were interviewed for the
research -- supported by UNAIDS -- which also found that there was still
serious stigmatisation of people living with HIV in China.
Beijing's Renmin University conducted the survey.
Less than a fifth of respondents said they would use a condom if they had
sex with a new partner, and more than 63 percent would be unwilling to
accept services like hairdressing from an HIV-infected person.
More than 48 percent thought they could contract HIV from a mosquito
bite, and over 41 percent would be unwilling to work with a person infected
with HIV.
China has about 700,000 HIV/AIDS carriers, with an estimated 50,000
people infected in 2007, according to UNAIDS.
But campaigners have warned the figure could be up to 10 times higher
since many HIV cases go unreported and testing is not widespread.
The Chinese government has in recent years stepped up its AIDS awareness
campaign.
In February authorities launched their first anti-AIDS programme focused
on gay men.
However, one of the nation's most prominent AIDS campaigners, Hu Jia, is
in prison for incitement to subvert state power.
BEIJING - Agents who collect or supply blood that causes
death or serious illness face stricter punishments starting Tuesday in an
attempt by Chinese authorities to crack down on the illegal sale of blood.
Those found guilty of collecting or supplying blood that causes at
least five people to contract AIDS, hepatitis B, hepatitis C or syphilis,
or that leads to severe anemia or organ malfunction, could face 10 years
to life in prison, said a statement by the Supreme People's Court and the
Supreme People's Procuratorate carried by the official Xinhua News Agency.
Unhygienic blood-buying rings were responsible for infecting thousands
of people with HIV/AIDS in rural areas of central China, mostly in Henan
province, during the mid-1990s. This led to stricter laws on donating
blood, making it illegal to sell blood without approval.
But Tuesday's amendment significantly clarifies the range of actions
and punishments in China's criminal code, and adds the names of diseases
for the first time.
Ni Shouming, the spokesman for the Supreme People's Procuratorate, was
quoted Tuesday by the China Daily newspaper as saying blood suppliers who
fail to operate according to national standards also face jail terms of
less than 10 years.
Last year, six people in China's southern Guangdong province were
jailed for illegally organizing blood sales and helping people repeatedly
sell blood under false names.
By CLARE NULLIS, Associated Press WriterFri
Sep 26, 3:25 PM ET
AIDS
activists on Friday celebrated the removal of South Africa's health
minister, accused of causing countless unnecessary deaths by promoting
nutritional supplements instead of conventional medicine for people with
HIV.
New President Kgalema Motlanthe, within hours of taking office Thursday,
won instant praise by announcing that Manto Tshabalala-Msimang would be
removed as health minister and given a lesser post in his office.
Speaking to reporters Friday after being sworn in to her new job as head
of government communications, Tshabalala-Msimang rejected criticism.
"The only critics were the media, and the media had lost
perception," she said, adding: "I am very excited about the new
challenge."
Activists accused Tshabalala-Msimang of spreading confusion about AIDS by
saying she did not trust antiretroviral medicines and preferred nutritional
remedies such as garlic, beetroot, lemon, olive oil and the African potato.
Her views earned her the nicknames "Dr. Garlic" and "Dr.
Beetroot" and made her a favorite target for cartoonists.
South Africa now has the world's highest number of people with HIV,
counting some 5.4 million people as infected with the virus that causes
AIDS, activists say.
"Tens of thousands of South Africans have lost their lives because
of her ridiculous policies on HIV/AIDS, and she should have been fired nine
years ago," the opposition Democratic Alliance said.
Tshabalala-Msimang's removal suggested a stark shift in South Africa's
AIDS policy and was seen as a sign that Motlanthe would pursue his own
course, despite promises he would not substantially change ousted President
Thabo Mbeki's economic policies.
Jacob Zuma, the ANC leader expected to be propelled to the presidency in
elections next year, has promised to step up the fight on AIDS. Mbeki
himself had had to shift his policy, appointing then-Deputy President
Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka to spearhead anti-AIDS efforts in 2006. But
Mlambo-Ngcuka resigned in solidarity with Mbeki, which could have put the
AIDS fight back in Tshabalala-Msimang's hands.
Instead, anti-apartheid veteran Barbara Hogan, who had criticized Mbeki's
for not firing Tshabalala-Msimang, will be sworn in as health minister along
with other new Cabinet appointees on Friday.
The Treatment Action Campaign — which fought numerous legal battles
against Tshabalala-Msimang and once branded her a "murderer" —
threw an impromptu party in Cape Town celebrating her removal.
"Over 2 million South Africans died of AIDS during the presidency of
Thabo Mbeki. At least 300,000 deaths could have been avoided," it said.
"Mbeki and his health minister pursued a policy of politically
supported AIDS denialism and undermined the scientific governance of
medicine."
Mbeki was notorious for his denial that HIV caused AIDS and his refusal
to accept the scale of the epidemic.
The former U.N. envoy for AIDS in Africa, Stephen Lewis, slammed Mbeki's
AIDS policies during a speech at a 2006 conference in Toronto as "more
worthy of a lunatic fringe than of a concerned and compassionate
state."
Tshabalala-Msimang subsequently declared Lewis persona non grata in South
Africa, prompting more than 80 international scientists and academics to
write an open letter to Mbeki.
"To promote ineffective, immoral policies on HIV/AIDS endangers
lives," the scientists wrote in 2006. "To have as a health
minister a person who now has no international respect is an embarrassment
to the South African government."
Tshabalala-Msimang — one of Mbeki's closest allies — shrugged off
constant calls for her resignation that reached a crescendo at the 2006 AIDS
conference, where the South African stand featured a display of garlic and
lemons.
"Raw garlic and a skin of the lemon — not only do they give you a
beautiful face and skin, but they also protect you from disease," she
had said in 2005, adding that her medical training in the former Soviet
Union had taught her beetroot was also vital in any diet.
She repeatedly stressed her mistrust of antiretroviral medicine, saying
too little was known about the side-effects.
"All I am bombarded about is antiretrovirals, antiretrovirals,"
she said. "There are other things we can be assisted in doing to
respond to HIV/AIDS in this country."
AIDS activists won a landmark court case in 2002 forcing the Health
Ministry to provide pregnant women with drugs to prevent them from infecting
their unborn children, and another in 2003 to give antiretroviral therapy to
people in advanced stages of the disease.
In June, the Treatment Action Campaign and South African Medical
Association won a case forcing the ministry to close down the operations of
Matthias Rath, a German who peddled vitamins in poor townships while
claiming they could cure the disease and that anti-AIDS medicines were
toxic. Tshabalala-Msimang had refused to condemn Rath.
Tshabalala-Msimang was hospitalized in October 2006 with lung problems
and had a liver transplant the following March. In her absence, her
respected deputy health minister, Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, mended fences
with AIDS activists, but was then sacked by Mbeki — with
Tshabalala-Msimang's support.
Madlala-Routledge was named deputy parliamentary speaker on Thursday amid
rapturous applause from all parties.
Radio talks shows buzzed Friday, with callers hailing the removal of
Tshabalala-Msimang.
JOHANNESBURG, 25 September 2008 - As
South Africa prepared to swear in a new president on 25 September after the
dramatic ousting of Thabo Mbeki four days before, attempts by commentators to
summarise the former president's mixed legacy have not failed to mention his
controversial stance on AIDS.
AIDS activists and civil
society groups have long argued that government commitment and leadership are
crucial to the success of national AIDS programmes; in countries like
Uganda
and
Thailand
, HIV prevalence declined steeply after leaders made combating the disease a
priority.
At the other end of the
spectrum, they have linked Mbeki's questioning of HIV as the cause of AIDS and
his suspicion of antiretrovirals (ARVs) to a slow and inadequate AIDS response
in
South Africa
. The health department has responded by pointing to its ARV treatment
programme, which it describes as the largest in the world.
Nicoli Nattrass, director
of the AIDS and Society Research Unit at
South Africa
's
University
of
Cape Town
, decided to test the assumption that having the largest ARV programme in the
world demonstrated good leadership in the context of the country's HIV burden,
also the largest in the world.
"My suspicion was that
South Africa
had the resources and institutional capacity to do much better," she told
IRIN/PlusNews. "The only way to resolve the issue was to conduct a
cross-country analysis to find out what level of [ARV] rollout one would expect
for a country with
South Africa
's characteristics."
Using ARV treatment
coverage as a key indicator of commitment to combating AIDS, Nattrass compared
82 AIDS-affected developing countries, taking into account the impact of
socio-economic and institutional factors beyond the control of governments.
She found that when it came
to implementing effective AIDS policies, good leadership could overcome resource
constraints, health system weaknesses and other limitations.
According to an article by
Nattrass in the September issue of the Journal of Public Health, a British
publication, "The study provides empirical support for much of the
conventional wisdom about AIDS leadership at country level."
The reputation of countries
like
Uganda
,
Brazil
and
Thailand
as "poster children for good AIDS leadership", for example, was found
to be well deserved; considering their relative AIDS burdens and available
resources and capacity, their ARV treatment programmes were exceeding
expectations. On the other hand,
South Africa
,
Uruguay
and
Trinidad and Tobago
were performing well below expectations.
Commenting on the study,
Justin Steyn, a researcher at the Governance and AIDS Programme of the Institute
for Democracy in South Africa (IDASA), an independent non-profit public interest
organisation, pointed out that a country's ARV rollout was only one indicator of
political leadership on AIDS. "It's very difficult to measure leadership;
it's a very abstract concept," he told IRIN/PlusNews. "Measuring it
through rollout is only one way."
Nattrass responded that
although ARV coverage only indicated one aspect of a national AIDS policy, it
was the one on which data was most readily available, and also the basis on
which
South Africa
's AIDS leadership was being defended.
"It would have been
good to have data on what kinds of drug regimens were being used, on how much
treatment literacy there was," she said, "but my study was limited to
the available international statistics."
Godknows Giya, another
researcher at IDASA, noted that there are many important variables that affect a
country's ARV programme, such as weak infrastructure or the affect of stigma on
uptake, which the study did not take into account because they have not been
captured through data.
In 2007, Nattrass published
"Mortal Combat: AIDS Denialism and the Struggle for Antiretrovirals in
South Africa", in which she chronicled the alleged influence of dissident
AIDS theories on Mbeki and his health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, and
their reluctance to roll out ARV therapy.
She was optimistic that the
government's leadership on HIV and AIDS would improve in the wake of Mbeki's
resignation this week. "But it depends crucially on who they put in place
as the new Health Minister," she said. "Anyone is better than
Tshabalala-Msimang."
On 25 September, new
President Kgalema Motlanthe stripped Tshabalala-Msimang of her post, reassigning
her to a lesser cabinet position.
Around
16 million people around the world inject illegal drugs, and nearly one in
five of them may have the AIDS virus, according to an estimate published
online Wednesday by The Lancet.
The global tally of intravenous drug users (IDUs) is put at 15.9 million,
around three million of whom could have the human immunodeficiency virus
(HIV), it says.
China has largest number of IDUs, with a mid-range estimate of 2.35
million people. The HIV infection rate among them is calculated at 12.3
percent.
The United States has the second highest total, with around 1.85 million
IDUs and an estimated infection rate among them of between 15.6 percent.
The report also warned of high HIV numbers among IDUs in Ukraine and
Russia, which could be 42 percent and 37 percent respectively.
The assessment is led by Bradley Mathers of the National Drug and Alcohol
Research Centre at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.
It is based on official national figures and estimates published in
peer-reviewed journals.
The review covers 148 countries, but admits that many blanks remain where
the data are sketchy or absent and the range estimates are broad.
"Areas of particular concern are countries in Southeast Asia,
Eastern Europe and Latin America, where the prevalence of HIV among some
sub-populations of people who inject drugs has been reported to be over 40
percent," the paper says.
Injecting drug use is one of the major drivers for the global AIDS
pandemic.
HIV is spread by infected IDUs who share syringes or turn to
prostitution, which thus helps the virus to enter the main population.
AIDS campaigners say the problem has to be tackled by a panoply of
methods, including programmes to exchange used needles for sterile ones and
the use of methadone, an opiate substitute, to wean IDUs off heroin.
LONDON (Reuters) - The rate of HIV infection among people who inject
themselves with drugs appears to be rising, according to a study published on
Wednesday.
An estimated 3 million self-injecting drug users worldwide may be HIV
positive, said the analysis of peer-reviewed studies and data from United
Nations agencies and international experts.
It identified injected drug use in 148 countries and found HIV infections
among these kind of users topped 40 percent in nine nations: Estonia, Ukraine,
Myanmar (Burma), Indonesia, Thailand, Nepal, Argentina, Brazil and Kenya.
"The new data do suggest increases in both the number of injecting drug
users and the prevalence of HIV in users," Kamyar Arasteh and Don Des
Jarlais of Beth Israel Medical Center in New York wrote in a commentary about
the study published in the medical journal Lancet.
They said there may be time to educate people in countries where injecting
drug use is common but the virus has not yet begun infecting users to a large
degree.
Used syringes can spread HIV. Infected drug users are also more likely to
engage in risky behaviobehaviorur such as unprotected sex that can spread the
virus that causes AIDS.
The researchers estimated that in 2007 nearly 16 million people around the
world injected drugs, with China, the United States and Russia having the
largest number of such users.
They also noted there was little data from places in Africa but said
Southeast Asia, eastern Europe, and Latin America were areas of worry.
GLOBAL CHALLENGE
"Injecting drug use occurs in most countries and HIV infection is
prevalent among many populations of injecting drug users, representing a major
challenge to global health," Bradley Mathers of the National Drug and
Alcohol Research Center in Australia and colleagues wrote.
The review showed big differences worldwide. For example, in Britain 0.4
percent of people aged 15 to 64 injected drugs, with 2.3 percent of them
estimated to be HIV positive.
In Spain the proportion of addicts is lower at 0.31 percent but nearly 40
percent of them have HIV, the highest proportion in Europe, the researchers
said.
Australia and New Zealand have maintained a very low level of HIV infection
even though they have more injected drug users, something the researchers
attributed to swift introduction of needle and syringe exchange programs in the
1980s.
They also cited Estonia as a country representative of the quick spread of
HIV infections among drug users in recent years.
"A decade ago HIV was not identified among people who inject drugs in
Estonia," the researchers said. "A more recent estimate now suggests
that the prevalence of HIV infection in some populations has reached 72 percent
in one sample of injecting drug users."
Knowledge
and awareness of AIDS and HIV transmission in China is still low, even in
big cities like Shanghai, according to a survey released Friday.
