Protesters urge AIDS action
- Source: Global Times
- [02:19 November 26 2009]
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A file photo dated February 29, 2004 shows medical staff treating several AIDS patients at a hospital in Shangcai, Henan Province. Photo: Xinhua
By Lin Meilian
Gao Yanping had hoped to take the secret to her grave, but the signs were too clear, even to her 12-year-old son. Something was wrong, and his father's worsening condition confirmed it.
Gao and her husband had AIDS.
A few days before his death in March of 2007, her husband checked in to a hospital with chronic tuberculosis. Their son, who had been away at boarding school, finally asked his mother why she and his father had to take pills every day. She told him, "It is AIDS," and asked if he was afraid. He shook his head.
Gao, a resident of Kaifeng, Henan Province, one of the provinces worst-hit by AIDS, protested Wednesday morning in front of the Ministry of Health in Beijing with 37 other villagers infected with HIV or AIDS, mainly through blood transfusions or from their spouses.
The protest came less than a week before World AIDS Day and one day after an interna-tional AIDS control meeting in Shanghai, where Minister of Health Chen Zhu said Chi-na's HIV-positive population had reached nearly 320,000, prompting health experts to call for stronger efforts to curb the spread of the virus that causes AIDS.
After about an hour, the protesters were moved from the ministry compound to a designated petition office several kilometers away, where they said health ministry officials "patiently" listened to them but didn't make any promises.
"We came to ask the government to provide more financial aid and free treatment," Gao told the Global Times.
No one from the Ministry of Health was available for comment Wednesday.
To earn extra money, Gao's husband started selling plasma to a local blood station for 50 yuan each time in the mid- 1990s. In exchange, 400cc of blood was drawn – the maximum that can be collected from one person at one time under Chinese health regulations. The plasma in his blood was removed and frozen for hospital transfusions, and his blood protein was pumped back into his body.
