News (Updated October 17, 2004)
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"Not one person should be missed," said a notice posted on the ministry website. It added that the survey comes at a time when the country's AIDS situation is "critical".
"Those who became infected with the virus by selling blood around 1995 have entered the peak of symptoms and death," it said.
"A growing number of AIDS cases involving blood sellers have been exposed in some regions which were not previously regarded as being seriously affected. At the same time, there are still some areas where HIV-positive blood sellers remain undiscovered."
Detecting and treating the infected, many of whom were poor farmers desperate for income, was an "urgent task... without immediate anti-retroviral therapy, they will die in a short period of time," it said.
The ministry said in its notice that every local government must present a report by April 15, 2005 with a database on which residents in their jurisdiction have sold blood.
The blood sellers would then be tested for the HIV virus, the ministry said, adding that their privacy would be protected.
China says it has an estimated 840,000 HIV/AIDS patients, of which some 20 percent are believed to have been infected through unsanitary and often illegal blood buying schemes.
International activists say the real figure is probably much higher, with the United Nations and even government officials saying there could be 10 million cases by 2010 if the epidemic goes unchecked.
Independent health workers in the hardest hit province, Henan, said there could be one million people who sold blood and contracted HIV in that province alone.
The blood-selling schemes, carried out in many provinces, were endorsed by the government. Chinese leaders in the past year have finally begun seriously addressing the problem after initially ignoring it.
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Sun Oct 10, 6:56 PM ET
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BEIJING (AFP) - The once-conservative city of
Beijing plans to set up 1,000 condom vending machines in a bid to curb the
spread of AIDS, state media said.
The machines will be installed in hotels, bars and university campuses and sell "quality-guaranteed" products at one yuan (12 US cents) a piece, the Xinhua news agency reported.
As a novelty, the vending machines will also appear in construction sites, in an apparent attempt to reach out to the millions of migrant workers who crowd the capital.
It is believed that migrant workers, who are away from their families for months or years on end, are among the top customers of local prostitutes.
While setting up the new machines, municipal authorities will also launch a month-long drive to renovate 1,700 existing vending machines that are mostly either broken or empty, Xinhua said.
The Chinese government has kicked off an ambitious anti-AIDS campaign calling for condom use to spread to at least 50 percent of the country's high-risk populations by the end of next year.
The World Health Organization estimates at least 1.5 million people in the Western Pacific region are living with HIV/AIDS, with China accounting for two thirds of the number.
Data indicates HIV infections in sex workers and intravenous drug users were increasing in several countries i the region, including China.
Rates of HIV prevalence in intravenous drug users range from 20 percent in south China's Guangdong province to as high as 89 percent in western Xinjiang region.
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Mon Oct 11, 2:23 AM ET
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BEIJING, (AFP) - The southern province of Guangdong is offering free HIV tests to homosexual men as part of its fight against the spread of the virus which causes AIDS.
The provincial centre for
disease control's AIDS institute began interviewing and offering tests to gay
men Sunday as part of its research into the spread of HIV among homosexuals, the
China Daily and the Guangdong-based Information Times said.
HIV infection in Guangdong is believed to be spread predominantly through heterosexual sex and, to a lesser degree, needle-sharing among drug users, the centre's deputy director He Qun said.
The testing of gay men is being organized amid heightened alarm over the rapid rise of HIV/AIDS cases in the country. Gay men, along with prostitutes, are considered a high risk population as studies have found many practice unsafe sex.
The World Health Organization estimates at least 1.5 million people in the Western Pacific region are living with HIV/AIDS, with China accounting for two-thirds of that number.
Guangdong is also planning to build a syphilis prevention and treatment centre to handle the growing number of patients suffering from the sexually transmitted disease.
The province had 9,000 syphilis patients last year, the highest number in the country, the China Daily said without giving comparative figures.
GENEVA, Oct 15 (Reuters) - An ambitious global plan to get millions of poor AIDS victims on life-extending drugs by the end of next year has fallen behind schedule because funds are being spent too slowly, the World Health Organisation said on Friday.
Only 440,000 of the six million AIDS patients in developing countries who need such treatment get it. The World Health Organisation (WHO) had hoped to cross the half-million mark by the end of June.
"The problem is the money is not flowing as well as it should," Dr. Jim Yong Kim, director of the HIV/AIDS department at the WHO, told Reuters in an interview. "We just need to catch up. I think we will, we can."
The WHO goal is for three million people in Africa, Asia and Latin America to be taking antiretroviral drugs by the end of 2005 in a programme known as "three by five", estimated to cost up to $6 billion.
AIDS activists have expressed growing alarm that the United Nations agency is lagging behind in the programme, launched with fanfare in December 2003, to expand antiretroviral therapy.
"The number of sites that can deliver antiretroviral therapy is increasingly rapidly in places like Zambia, Swaziland and Lesotho. They are training people and getting delivery sites established," Kim said.
Asia, with some of the sharpest rises in infections, is also offering more drugs. "China and India are almost competing with each other to see who can scale up the fastest," he said.
READY TO GO
Projects are funded through agencies including the World Bank, the U.S. President's Fund, and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. WHO provides technical help.
Agencies have funds, but disbursement has been slow to Malawi and other countries, according to Kim, an American expert on infectious diseases on leave from Harvard Medical School.
"We think the money is there, it's ready to go, they are getting their systems in place. If these problems can be cleared up soon, we could see a pretty dramatic increase (in treatment) starting soon," he said.
"If you look at other treatment scale-up projects, it doesn't happen in a linear fashion -- it always goes slowly at first. When all the elements are in place then it goes up very, very rapidly."
An estimated 40 million people worldwide live with HIV/AIDS, including 26 million in Sub-Saharan Africa. The deadly virus has killed more than 20 million people in two decades and there are five million new infections every year.
In Swaziland -- where no AIDS patients had antiretrovirals a year ago -- 4,000 people are now under treatment, Kim said.
This suggests that the tiny kingdom -- which has one of the world's highest rates of HIV infection with close to four in 10 adults carrying the virus -- could meet its target of 14,000.
In Zambia, the number of HIV/AIDS sufferers under treatment climbed from 4,000 to 7,000 between March and July, he said.
Kim also urged pharmaceutical companies to develop cheap, generic antiretrovirals for children in developing countries.
Drugs for treating children are available in wealthy countries but the price is out of reach in poor countries, where health workers struggle to break up pills or serve messy syrups.
"We need pediatric formulations very badly," Kim said. "We think that 15 to 20 percent of deaths from HIV are children, yet less than one percent of people on treatment are kids."
WHO, the U.N. Children's Fund UNICEF and aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) are holding talks with drugs makers in Geneva in early November on the issue.
"The treatment of children is far, far behind where it should be," MSF's Sean Healy told Reuters.
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Sat Oct 16, 6:15 PM ET
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CHAIYAPHUM, Thailand (AFP) - A one-legged German who is at the centre of a mass HIV scare involving hundreds of Thai women and girls faces deportation from the country, officials said.
Hans-Otto Schiemann, 54,
told AFP he was confirmed with the HIV virus three years ago, and health
officials said he could have had unprotected sex with up to 400 people.
Schiemann, who boasted of being like "heroin to girls", posed such a health threat that authorities printed banners and thousands of flyers warning students away from him.
He was arrested for overstaying his visa and faces deportation at a court hearing on Monday, but Thai officials said they were powerless to take action over allegations about his sexual conduct.
Other countries, including the United States and Britain, have prosecuted men who have had unprotected sex knowing they had the virus but the scale of the case in Thailand has shocked officials and the community.
In a 30-minute interview with AFP in a prison meeting room, Schiemann -- married to a Thai woman for five years who is now ravaged with AIDS -- complained of being persecuted.
"They persecute playboys here like Hitler persecuted the Jews," said the bearded Schiemann, who showed no remorse about continuing to have sex with women.
"I got it (HIV) three years ago, I didn't have it when I first came here," he said, but added it was "not important in my body".
He declined to go into more details about his sexual campaign other than saying: "I am heroin to girls."
He also boasted of paying off the police. "I am smart and I know the law better than they do. Soon I will be free."
Neighbours said Schiemann drove around this northern Thai town and offered large sums of money for sex. He also frequented karaoke bars to find women.
"We don't know how many girls he has had relations with but we estimate that it could reach 400," a health official assigned to the case told AFP.
A banner commissioned by a town hospital named Schiemann as a health threat to women and warned that he was "seeking female students to have sex with him for a lot of money".
The warning added: "Female students please be careful and try to send him back to his country."
The hospital has urged all girls in and around the town to be tested for HIV/AIDS regardless of whether they slept with the German.
Schiemann, a former sailor in the German navy who first visited Thailand nine years ago, refused to have a blood test at Chaiyaphum prison to confirm he has HIV or AIDS, police said.
Official estimates of the scale of his sexual activities were supported by neighbours.
"I know of about 100 girls between the age of 15 and 17 who Schiemann paid about 5,000 baht (125 dollars) for unprotected sex," said a neighbour, who did not want to be named.
The sum would be equivalent to more than the monthly income of a family in Thailand's poorest region known as Issan.
Many impoverished women from the region are drawn into the kingdom's infamous sex industry and some local officials actively campaign for women to marry foreign men to try to bring more money into the area.
Left frail by the effects of advanced AIDS, Schiemann's wife Jiraporn Paktaku, 30, told AFP at her home that she lived in fear of her husband being released to prey on women again.
She said she was always locked in a room every time her husband went off to have sex with other women. "I knew about the women but I told him it was okay because I was so afraid of being hurt," she said.
"I only discovered I had AIDS when I went to hospital last year after I swallowed poison to try to kill myself."
If found guilty of immigration offences Schiemann was likely to be deported, according to Lieutenant Colonel Khampol Nonuch, heading the investigation into the German. He could also be jailed for up to two years.
It was not immediately clear if he would be sent back to Germany if found guilty.