A nurse prepares to collect blood from a donor during a volunteer blood donation campaign to mark World AIDS Day. (Photo : Getty Images/ China Photos)
Within the last decade, the share of new HIV infections in China among men who have sex with men has jumped at an alarming rate from 1 percent in 2005 to 27 percent in 2015. Prior to this, most of the HIV cases were among prostitutes, drug users and Henan farmers who sold blood to unlicensed blood banks.
The growth of HIV infection rates is even more alarming in Nanchang City which logged a 43 percent rise in the last five years among students of the city’s colleges. More than 80 percent were among males who had same-sex encounters, reported Wall Street Journal.
Health authorities are worried about the trend, while observers said this development is the result of official response to homosexuality which classified it as a mental disease until 2001. Fifteen years after the official delisting, there are still reports of families forcing gay men to be confined in the mental hospital because of sexual preference disorder.
Public discussions of gay issues or rights are quashed, like what happened to a court hearing on a lawsuit filed by a gay student against the Ministry of Education for not updating college textbooks on homosexuality having been removed from the list 15 years ago. But authorities instead gagged the journalists who covered the court hearing.
National HIV figures are even bigger red flags because while the number of people living with HIV in the Asian giant is estimated at 575,000, about 100,000 are added yearly. In contrast only 40,000 are added to the 1.2 million HIV patients in the U.S. American health authorities explain the new infections going flat because of effective prevention and aggressive testing efforts.
Although China started to provide free antiretroviral drugs to people who test positive for HIV, homosexuality and sexually transmitted diseases are almost taboo topics in the country until now.
