(no subject)
Jul. 11th, 2002 01:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
botiasNew Thing I Learned: There is a $25,000,000 reward for Osama bin Laden
The BBC is depressing. I learned today there are villages in China that are largely HIV+ due the charming activities of the local bureaucrats. Apparently, the villagers were being paid the equivalent of 2 weeks wages to donate blood. The plasma was spun out of it and sold for a large profit to pharmaceutical companies. Some researchers estimate that 600,000 people were infected with HIV from infected needles or being given blood that had been mixed with that of other villagers after the plasma had been removed. Apparently the rural Chinese are superstitious about ‘losing’ blood so in some cases it was injected back into them. I tried to talk to my coworkers about it a bit, but they didn’t seem to feel the same impact. “Well that wasn’t very smart.” “Wouldn’t they get sick from getting blood of different types?” Well, uh, they are getting sick aren’t they. The folks that perpetrated this are the very ‘health officials’ that are supposed to run the clinics that serve the villagers. Damn, if that’s not time for a peasant uprising I don’t know what is. These people know they are going to die anyway. I would be wanting to take a ‘health official’ or two with me before I went. Or maybe I would just be wondering how my children are going to eat after I die. The situation is actually much worse in Africa, where there are estimated to be as many as 20,000,000 AIDS orphans by the end of the decade. I don’t think AIDS will ever be more than one more tragic way to die in this country, outside of a high risk minority, but it is a catastrophic pandemic playing out in slow motion in less developed countries.
The BBC is depressing. I learned today there are villages in China that are largely HIV+ due the charming activities of the local bureaucrats. Apparently, the villagers were being paid the equivalent of 2 weeks wages to donate blood. The plasma was spun out of it and sold for a large profit to pharmaceutical companies. Some researchers estimate that 600,000 people were infected with HIV from infected needles or being given blood that had been mixed with that of other villagers after the plasma had been removed. Apparently the rural Chinese are superstitious about ‘losing’ blood so in some cases it was injected back into them. I tried to talk to my coworkers about it a bit, but they didn’t seem to feel the same impact. “Well that wasn’t very smart.” “Wouldn’t they get sick from getting blood of different types?” Well, uh, they are getting sick aren’t they. The folks that perpetrated this are the very ‘health officials’ that are supposed to run the clinics that serve the villagers. Damn, if that’s not time for a peasant uprising I don’t know what is. These people know they are going to die anyway. I would be wanting to take a ‘health official’ or two with me before I went. Or maybe I would just be wondering how my children are going to eat after I die. The situation is actually much worse in Africa, where there are estimated to be as many as 20,000,000 AIDS orphans by the end of the decade. I don’t think AIDS will ever be more than one more tragic way to die in this country, outside of a high risk minority, but it is a catastrophic pandemic playing out in slow motion in less developed countries.
