para los que admiran a China

(primera parte de una serie contra las BRIC economies -Brazil, Russia, India, China- en las que dicen que está el futuro del mundo).

By that time, however, [AIDS] was well established among two large groups. One was chiefly made up of peasants in central China, people so poor that in the late 1980s and early 1990s they readily and regularly sold their blood to dealers known as bloodheads. The trade was vastly profitable in a country with a huge need for blood and no tradition of giving it.

In some places, almost everyone was bringing blood to the market; collection points were often set up in fields. But the onset of anaemia soon put a limit on the amount that sellers could provide. Not for long: by 1993 the bloodheads realised that they could both keep anaemia at bay and harvest an almost perpetual crop if they took only plasma. To cut costs, they mixed together the blood of all the peasants of the same group before extracting the plasma. They then separated the plasma and transfused the remaining blood corpuscles back to the peasants. No surer way of spreading hepatitis-B, hepatitis-C, malaria and HIV could be imagined, especially as many blood-sellers went from one collection point to the next.

More people in China have contracted AIDS through the sale of blood—the equipment used was usually unsterilised— than through any other means. In Henan province alone, according to a recent report, about 300,000 people became infected, mostly in 1994-96. Roughly 170,000 people contracted HIV through the sale of plasma, the other 130,000 through the use of dirty syringes in the collection of whole blood, or by getting it through transfusion.