China sends a million teachers to fight AIDS

China sends a million teachers to fight AIDS

China will send 1 million students to the countryside as teachers in a belated attempt to curtail the spread of AIDS.

The mass mobilisation reverses years of public neglect of an epidemic till now regarded as a disease afflicting foreigners.

The move was announced to mark World AIDS Day, and suggests the Communist Party has accepted the most dire forecasts for the spread of the epidemic.


Official United States sources estimate China will have between 10 and 20 million people infected with HIV by the end of this decade.

The campaign has echoes of the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76, when a generation of students was dispatched to the countryside to "learn from the peasants".

Despite the troubling historical overtones, observers welcomed it as a step by China to use its totalitarian system to fight the spread of the disease.

Ray Yip, a senior project officer for UNICEF, the United Nations Children's Fund, said Beijing had to accept the gravity of the epidemic. "The thing we have to move is the central nervous system. Once it moves, the arms and legs will move."

Cover-up and denial, the hallmarks of the official attitude towards AIDS to date, have intensified the suffering of hundreds of thousands of peasants who struggle with a disease spread largely by unhygienic schemes to collect donated blood. In villages across the country, AIDS patients lie on brick beds, unable to claim treatment from the Government and unable to provide for their families.

Rodney Hatfield, deputy regional director of UNICEF, said: "The epidemic is still growing very quickly and it will continue. The biggest thing is for everyone to accept this is a major problem that can, if not handled properly, interrupt China's economic growth."

China risked not only an economic decline but a complete reversal of social gains made over the past few years, such as progress in reducing child mortality, Mr Hatfield said.

While infection festers in the countryside, Beijing has been warned that cities are vulnerable as the disease spreads beyond high-risk groups, such as drug users, to the general population.

Beijing has acknowledged there are 1 million cases of AIDS and HIV, up from 600,000 last year. Worldwide, 42 million people have the AIDS virus.

On Sunday millions of people around the globe marked World AIDS Day with marches, prayers and hope amid grim statistics that show the epidemic outpacing all efforts to control it.

In Papua New Guinea the Prime Minister, Michael Somare, warned that AIDS posed an "invisible national emergency" for his country.

"People are being thrown out of their homes or banished from their villages merely on suspicion of having HIV/AIDS."

The Telegraph, London; AAP