The Land of the Three Nos

By Nana Dadzie Ghansah

In the early 1990s, HIV spread like wildfire in the Chinese provinces of Henan, Hebei, Anhui, Shaanxi, and Shanxi. Between 200,000 and 300,000 were infected because of the trade in blood and blood products by thousands of public and commercial blood and plasma collection centers.

These centers, whose actions were poorly policed and controlled, led to the infection of thousands with HIV and other blood-borne pathogens. A lot of them reused needles. Plasma was often pooled and red cells mixed up without testing.

The Chinese government denied this was going on and for years resisted all attempts by outside agencies like the WHO to bring this under control. It was only after two female doctors from Henan — Shuping Wang and Gao Yaojie — blew the whistle on the outbreak that the government moved to ban the blood centers and deal with the outbreak.

In November 2002, a contagious respiratory illness broke out in Guangdong Province in China. Over the next few months as the disease -which came to be known as SARS — spread, the Chinese government repressed information about the disease, initially from its own people and when that was not possible anymore, from the rest of the world.

China’s Ministry of Central Publicity ordered the “three nos”: no…