Forging a United Front Against AIDS

Drew Thompson, South China Morning Post
October 21, 2003 Forging a United Front Against Aids The visit to Beijing by US Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson, which began yesterday, is a noteworthy example of America's continuing efforts to lead the world in HIV/Aids diplomacy. The first visit by a US Secretary of Health to China since 1988, it establishes that preventing public health calamities is a key element of the US global health strategy. At the recent HIV/Aids high-level meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, Chinese Vice-Minister of Health Gao Qiang announced China currently has 840,000 HIV cases, of which 80,000 have developed Aids. This data implies a 20 per cent increase in HIV infections and a 140 per cent increase in Aids cases during the same period last year. It indicates the rate of new infections is increasing steadily as the epidemic matures and those infected years ago begin to show symptoms of full-blown Aids. Without effective intervention, one in 100 Chinese could be infected with HIV by the time Beijing hosts the Olympics in 2008. Approximately 80 per cent of China's Aids victims are rural residents. Infections are centred largely among intravenous drug users and commercial blood donors. Contact between these high-prevalence groups and "bridge-populations" ­ which include commercial sex workers, their clients and more than 100 million domestic economic migrant workers ­ is currently spreading the Aids virus from high-risk groups into the general population. China's weak public health-care capacity was dramatically demonstrated by the government's inability to prevent the spread of Sars from Guangdong province to Hong Kong, Beijing and the rest of the world. More ominously, China's health-care system is struggling to implement national programmes to effectively treat and prevent the spread of HIV/Aids. At the beginning of this year, there were only about 100 doctors qualified to diagnose and treat HIV infection, and no national plan to test and counsel potential victims. China's application for US$98 million to the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria will support a significant initiative by establishing centres for care and treatment in 56 counties in central China. As China integrates globally, its economic and immunological health matters even more to Hong Kong, the US and the world. China is an engine of growth for the region, and the prospect of its economic decline concerns all its trading partners. An unchecked

HIV/Aids epidemic would affect China's long-term economic growth by increasing production costs and reducing productivity. By amplifying social and economic inequalities and causing extreme poverty, HIV/Aids could potentially spread civil unrest, which has already been witnessed in some hard-hit villages. The socio-economic impact of HIV/Aids is particularly acute because it strikes the most productive members of society while creating a generation of orphans who lack the education and skills to be productive members of a developing economy. The new leaders in Beijing are slowly coming to terms with the enormity of the HIV/Aids crisis. But, after an opaque and initially sluggish response to Sars, they have yet to prove they will make hard political decisions and commit the resources necessary to prevent the spread of HIV/Aids to the general population. As the centre of the Aids pandemic moves towards Asia, it is in America's national interest to actively engage China at the highest political levels to combat what US President George W. Bush has called the "humanitarian crisis of our time". The visits by Mr Thompson and the director of the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Julie Gerberding, to Beijing, and the US government's steadily increasing investment in China's HIV/Aids efforts, both in terms of personnel and financial resources, indicate a stepped-up US commitment. Mr Thompson's announcement that a health attache will be permanently assigned to the US embassy in Beijing, as well as the formal opening of the US CDC's Global Aids Programme office in Beijing, with two full-time CDC staffers, are both concrete examples of the US government's intention to decisively address China's public health situation. The US government needs to maintain this level of dialogue with China, putting HIV/Aids on the diplomatic agenda by linking China's HIV/Aids intervention efforts to all aspects of the US-China relationship, much the way human rights became an omnipresent component of the bilateral dialogue after 1989. Drew Thompson is a research associate for the Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC
Published in the South China Morning Post. Copyright © 2003. All rights reserved.

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