It’s business as usual in China, where the government hisses that it does care about AIDS in China, it really, really does:

CHINA today slammed an international rights group for “falsely” blaming government policy for a massive AIDS outbreak, and said it was determined to care for victims of the epidemic.

‘If some international organizations, based on some inaccurate information make irresponsible accusations against China, I think this will not go with the facts,” foreign ministry spokesman Kong Quan said.

“It is true that in some parts of Henan province there were some problems with blood collecting stations and it led to the spread of AIDS in that area. The central government attaches great importance to this issue.”

“SOME problems”? Well, keep in mind that these are the same leaders who blandly refer to the Tiananmen Square massacre as “an incident.”

The report, by Human Rights Watch, is damning indeed.

“The number of persons with HIV is much higher than the one million cases that Beijing officially acknowledges,” the 94-page report, ‘Locked Doors: The human rights of people living with HIV/AIDS in China,’ said.

[….]

While documenting discrimination against HIV-AIDS carriers in China, the rights report also accused China of driving HIV-AIDS patients underground instead of helping them, fuelling the spread of the potentially explosive epidemic.

“Human Rights Watch found that at one hospital, the door to the AIDS clinic was actually padlocked,” said the report which is based on more than 30 interviews with HIV/AIDS sufferers, police officers, drug users, and AIDS outreach workers in Beijing, Hong Kong, and southwestern Yunnan province.

I’ve written extensively on this topic here and won’t go into another rant (even though it’s warranted). Suffice it to say that the government bears responsibility for almost all aspects of this tragedy and that its track record of taking responsibility for and speaking honestly about the topic has been abysmal, and still is.

Related post: The indescribable tragedy of AIDS in China