No Justice for AIDS Victims in China

Talking about HIV/AIDS is difficult because so many people believe that those who are infected somehow willingly participated in an activity that warranted them to receive this eventual life ending illness.  That is not the case for tens of thousands of people suffering from HIV/AIDS in China.  These people are indisputable victims in that their government carelessly infected them due to grotesque negligence.

In the 1990s, the government collected blood donations from vagrants using dirty needles, pooled all the blood together, then stuck it back into people at random without testing anything for anything.  It is a pretty horrific story.

There is a long and detailed article about this all in the LA Times:

It was just a small bump on the head, the result of one boy pushing another against a desk. It was such an unremarkable occurrence in a third-grade classroom that it should have been forgotten a day later, buried in the recesses of childhood memory.

Who could have imagined that it would dictate the course of Tian Xi's life and of those around him?

After the incident, the 9-year-old was sent home from school to rest. That night he threw up, so his mother took him to Xincai People's Hospital No. 1, where a young doctor fresh out of medical school diagnosed a mild concussion and recommended a transfusion for a quicker recovery.

His parents collected their savings, the equivalent of six months' salary, to buy four bags of blood. They didn't want their son, a top student who they were sure would be the first in their family to attend a university, to miss too much school.

It was April 1996, and few people in this small city in Henan province had ever heard of HIV/AIDS.

Now 23 years old and weighing only 112 pounds — the result of the early stages of AIDS — Tian is confined to a detention center in Henan province. He is charged with storming uninvited into the offices of the director of the hospital where he was infected with human immunodeficiency virus and sweeping everything off the top of the desk with his arm. A fax machine, computer and water cooler were broken in the Aug. 2 incident. He is to be sentenced soon. [...]

Follow the link to read the rest.
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