Yesterday in my "AIDS in China" course, we watched the "Care and Love" 关爱之家 documentary by Director Ai Xiaoming. It provides an overview of the Xingtai Hospital situation, in which patients were given blood transfusions with infected blood. Because delivery can lead females to experience loss of blood, new mothers who delivered at the Xingtai Hospital became HIV positive and, subsequently, developed AIDS. However, because they were wholly unaware that they had become infected, they passed on the disease to their child(ren) through breastfeeding. The hospital denied that these patients had become infected through its services...it turns out that the then hospital director's relatives were government officials. In the end, some of these patients and their family members were compensated; the key word is some, NOT all.
I had previously watched this documentary at the University of Michigan, but it was good to watch it again after two years. Although those individuals with HIV/AIDS represents a small percentage of China's population, one must remember that China has over 1.3 billion people; even a small percentage translates into a growing issue.
One quote from the documentary that particularly struck me is, "AIDS is a disease, not a crime." The question is: are people willing to (are they ready to) increase their self-awareness and overcome the collective stigmatism surrounding AIDS?
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Interesting that you say that. I was talking to someone who worked for PATH and said that Diarrheal disease today has the stigma that AIDS had ten years ago....although both of them have enourmous hurdles to overcome in terms of perception.
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, I can't believe you actually read a part of my blog. Second of all, I can't believe you actually took the time to comment. Finally, thank you for this comment. Oftentimes, people look back at how they acted 10 years previous and can't remember why they acted that way at all...like I say, "people are afraid of what they don't know."
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