Information restrictions magnify severity of China's AIDS crisis

It is rare for a foreign doctor to get to China's rural areas, where its AIDS epidemic was born and takes a horrible toll. But recently, two nurses and I ventured into a poor farming area, Nizui in Hubei Province, as part of a Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) team to visit the Liu family and evaluate their 7-month-old baby. The child was the size of a two month old, but his eyes held the gaze of an 80-year-old man long acquainted with extreme suffering. The baby was dying of AIDS. His parents, aunts, and uncles were also HIV-positive.

The Liu family is one of thousands of poor farming families in China's interior who contracted HIV through contaminated blood donations during the 1990s, when under-regulated for-profit blood banking companies reused needles and transferred blood from infected donors to clean donors after extracting the plasma.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/edit/archives/2004/11/20/2003211837

Do a good deed by donating blood and getting a fatal illness as a result. Underregulation will do that.

So very, very sad. :cry: