The Billiken's Bluff

In the Shock and Awe sense of the word. The Chinese Government reports that 0.07% of its population is infected with HIV. In a country with well over a billion people this translates into 840,000 individuals with the virus.



How you ask did nearly 1 million people contract the virus? Through unprotected sex? Illict drugs?

This except from an article in the Economist describing the threat of AIDS in China:

By that time, however, the disease was well established among two large groups. One was chiefly made up of peasants in central China, people so poor that in the late 1980s and early 1990s they readily and regularly sold their blood to dealers known as Bloodheads. The trade was vastly profitable in a country with a huge need for blood and no tradition of giving it.

In some places, almost everyone was bringing blood to the market; collection points were often set up in fields. But the onset of anaemia soon put a limit on the amount that sellers could provide. Not for long: by 1993 the Bloodheads realised that they could both keep anaemia at bay and harvest an almost perpetual crop if they took only plasma. To cut costs, they mixed together the blood of all the peasants of the same group before extracting the plasma. They then separated the plasma and transfused the remaining blood corpuscles back to the peasants. No surer way of spreading hepatitis-B, hepatitis-C, malaria and HIV could be imagined, especially as many blood-sellers went from one collection point to the next.