“AIDS Fear” is China’s New Disease

A friend e-mailed me an extremely irresponsible article about a “mysterious new AIDS virus” in China. The article originated on Epoch Times, a newspaper that boasts a print readership in six countries.

Let me be as clear as I can be: THERE IS NO NEW AIDS/HIV VIRUS IN CHINA. NONE.

You’d think that a large organization like the Epoch Times would know better then to print a story this patently wrong, but they do not.

What the Epoch Times correspondent responsible for the story, Chen Yilian, caught wind of is something we at AHCB call “AIDS Fear.” I think of it as a mental illness unique to the Chinese context. (Update: The Shanghai Daily published a piece on this topic. China’s doctors are referring to this phenomenon as “AIDS phobia” and there is an official government investigation looking into the problem)

When I was in China, an extraordinary number of Chinese people believed that AIDS could be transmitted through saliva or even touch. This, of course, is false. But, it was a pathologic fear.

For example, I knew a restaurant owner that put on an AIDS awareness event. One of his managers refused to come to work, believing that people with AIDS would show up. This manager believed that “AIDS Saliva” would get into food and infect both her and all the other restaurant patrons unlucky to share the same air.

This pathological fear has been fed by a twenty-five year long misinformation campaign by the Chinese government. Basically, the Chinese Government spent the 1980s and early 1990s trying to convince the entire country that AIDS was only the white gay-man’s disease, as well as propagating long debunk myths that AIDS/HIV can be transmitted by saliva and touch.

It was clear by the mid-1990s that this had backfired. At that time international health experts were being let into the country and they discovered that AIDS was becoming a real problem in rural areas as well as city neighborhoods with migrant laborers. Since then the Chinese government started accepting the reality of the situation, but only slowly.

It was only last year that the government dropped the requirement that foreigners be tested for HIV before being allowed long-term visas. Still, the effects of twenty-five year’s worth of misinformation are astounding. My hunch is that this story is the result of a combination of things.

The first is the pathological fear just discussed. The second is xenophobia due to China’s recent and quite sudden opening to the outside world. And the third is that there are a lot of sick people in China; in particular a lot of sick people with hepatitis, which is another disease people hate talking about.As a result, when people get really sick they are very quick to think it is AIDS due to the fact that (1) they’ve been told for twenty-five years it is easy to get, (2) there are more foreigners in China today and more Chinese traveling abroad today than ever before so this confirms their suspicions that it is easy to get, and (3) they probably have a very real disease, but they may not know or have access to anyone who can tell them what it is.

If a “new AIDS” does ever crop up somewhere in China, rest assured that it will be front page on every newspaper in the world. Not just a third-rate organization like Epoch Times.

Thank you İçimdeki Ayı for sharing your photos on flickr