While the HIV/AIDS epidemics in sub-Saharan Africa are a focus of thousands of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and journalists, the burgeoning epidemic in China, with an estimated 700,000 infected, receives little serious attention.

It is a situation Wan Yanhai, M.D., one of the most outspoken Chinese AIDS activists, and his colleagues at the Beijing Aizhixing Institute of Health Education, China's foremost AIDS-awareness group, hope to remedy, said Yanhai, Feb. 20, in a talk in Biotechnology Building G10 on what is being done about AIDS in China.

Yanhai received his medical degree at the University of Shanghai in 1988, just three years after the first case of AIDS in China was reported. The Chinese government's attitude towards the disease, he said, has changed a great deal since then.

"The first official response ... told people not to worry about AIDS," said Yanhai, recalling that at the time AIDS was portrayed as "a disease of the Western lifestyle." This attitude changed in the mid-1990s, he said, when thousands of people in Henan province were infected with HIV via a state-run blood-donor program.

"The government started to recognize the beginnings of an epidemic," Yanhai said, "when the infection rate started rising. The infection rate by blood donors is now as high as 20 percent, and within certain groups and places, 40 to 50 percent." The Chinese government officially records the national infection rate to be less than half of 1 percent of the population.

In recent aggressive action, the government drew up a five-year action plan in 2006, under which persons with HIV or AIDS are given free anti-retroviral treatment. However, Chinese law "makes it impossible to be hired by the government, a school [or] to walk into a restaurant" if one has AIDS, said Yanhai, stressing the need to protect the rights of people living with HIV/AIDS.

"The two most important issues are treatment and compensation," Yanhai said. He added that as people become resistant to treatment, new medicines will be needed and that those infected through state blood-donor programs deserve compensation from the government.

These concerns, among others, are why the number of NGOs working on HIV/AIDS in China has grown to almost 500 in 2006, up from 10 in 2002.

"The number of community-based, grassroots organizations is increasing and becoming an indispensable force in the national response to the epidemic," said Yanhai, whose Beijing Aizhixing Institute is one such organization.

The institute provides legal services for those seeking treatment and compensation, health education and research, among other programs.

"Our mission is to provide AIDS prevention, care and support for the marginalized populations of China," said Yanhai, which includes sex workers, drug users, vulnerable youth, ethnic minorities and migrants.

He added that the HIV/AIDS epidemic requires more national and international attention on issues from patient's rights to policy changes. The lack of focus, he said half-jokingly, is due to the fact that "there are just too many problems in China." But in spreading awareness about HIV/AIDS and working to combat it, he said he hopes to encourage others to make the effort to reverse the spread of the disease in China.

Yanhai's lecture was sponsored by Cornell Health International, the East Asia Program and the Global Health Program.

Chandni Navalkha '10 is a writer intern at the Cornell Chronicle.