Lancet paper gives high marks to China for AIDS shift
China has firmly grasped the challenge of fighting AIDS, thanks to an
array of programmes to tackle HIV infection at the source and to a
watershed in political thinking, a paper published in The Lancet says.
The lengthy paper - authored by five Chinese and Western
public-health experts - amounts to a rare round of applause for Beijing
from a leading international medical journal.
It points to the government's needle-exchange and methadone
initiatives for drug users, safe-sex awareness campaigns among gays,
routine HIV testing among at-risk parts of the population and free drugs
for people infected with the AIDS virus.
"These bold programmes have emerged from a process of gradual and
prolonged dialogue and collaboration between officials at every level of
government, researchers, service providers, policymakers and
politicians, and have led to decisive action," the paper says. China's
first AIDS case was identified in 1985, in a dying tourist.
In 1989, the first indigenous cases were detected, in an outbreak
involving 146 infected heroin users in the southern province of Yunnan.
The authors say China's initial response was to try to contain and
isolate AIDS cases but this policy failed, for it may have encouraged
people with HIV to conceal their status, thus adding to the problem of
tracking reservoirs of the virus. One of the turning points was a 1997
workshop that gathered US and Chinese health experts and representatives
from international health agencies, the paper says.
That helped shift the country towards a policy of encouragement
rather than coercion and used scientific evidence, rather than moralism,
to guide the campaign.
Another big date was in 2003, when President Hu Jintao stepped up
commitments to the fight against AIDS and Prime Minister Wen Jinbao
publicly shook hands with AIDS patients on World AIDS Day, in a well-publicised
attack on stigma.
The paper uses the official figures - deemed a likely underestimate
by some experts - of 650,000 cases of HIV or AIDS in China at the end of
2005.
(AFP)
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