AFP: Chinese health official arrested for leaking AIDS secrets

By Robert J. Saiget

BEIJING, Aug 19 (AFP) - A leading health official in China's AIDS-stricken Henan province has been arrested, allegedly for leaking secret documents on the infection of tens of thousands of villagers through blood transfusions, an AIDS activist said Tuesday, citing officials.

Ma Shiwen, deputy director of the Henan Center for Disease Control (CDC), was arrested for leaking documents on the Henan epidemic to the non-governmental AIDS activist organization Aizhi Action Group, according to the group's director, Wan Yanhai.

"According to health officials in Henan, Ma Shiwen was arrested in recent days and is being charged with leaking state secrets," Wan told AFP from the United States, where he is a visiting scholar.

"It's possible that the secrets leaked concerned official documents that were anonymously sent to Aizhi Action Group on August 24 last year and which revealed the extent of the AIDS outbreak in Henan."

Wan was himself detained and charged with leaking state secrets days after he received the documents and posted them on his group's website.

He was released a month later following a huge international outcry and after police confirmed that the documents were anonymously sent to the AIDS group.

"As far as I know, Ma Shiwen has not been formally sacked, he is still deputy director of the section, he has just disappeared," a colleague at the Henan CDC told AFP Tuesday.

"He may have committed some wrongdoing, or may have some sort of problem, we just don't know where he is," said the colleague who refused to identify himself.

Other officials at Henan's health bureau and at the provincial public security bureau refused to comment when contacted.

The Henan AIDS epidemic has long been a sensitive issue for the government which has worked to cover up the outbreak since it first came to light in the mid-1990s.

Entire villages, including tens of thousands of poor villagers, contracted HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, from the mid-1980s because of unsanitary blood collections.

China's health ministry announced in August 2002 that about a million Chinese were estimated to be carrying the HIV virus with a significant percentage in Henan, and warned that the figure could rise tenfold before the end of the decade.

The numbers were a vast increase in what the government, which views epidemics as state secrets, had previously stated.

In June 2002 a United Nations report on AIDS said China could already have around 1.5 million HIV carriers and faced an "AIDS catastrophe" if swift action was not taken.

China's new openness on the Henan issue has come as growing numbers of villagers stricken with AIDS become increasingly vocal over the government's role in the epidemic and dissatisfaction over a lack of health services and medication in rural areas.

On June 22 up to 600 policemen stormed into Xiongqiao village in Wulong township in Henan and arrested AIDS activists who had protested the government's treatment of thousands of HIV carriers in the region.

Other villages in the area have also been raided and suspected protest leaders rounded up since June 22, rights groups and AIDS activists said.

Some of those arrested have been formally charged with robbery and attacking government offices, locals have said.

The police action has caused widespread alarm in the international community and among AIDS awareness groups and rights organizations.

http://www.ptd.net/webnews/wed/dh/Qchina-aids.Rc80_DaJ.html

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