AIDS: agony hidden in the depths of the mountains
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When the white powder brought him rapture, the man from the Yi minority group didn't know that something dreadful was in store for him later: poverty, shame and, ultimately, death.
"Living with this disease is even worse than being a dog," said 39-year-old Qubisuobu from the Dawenquan Village of mountainous Zhaojue County, southwest China's Sichuan Province, who was discovered to be infected with HIV in 2002.
His adobe house was in a valley. When winter came, temperatures dropped to below zero and the wind howled outside. Squatting down by a fire-pan to warm himself, Qubisuobu, in a black mantle, coughed from time to time. Lesions began appearing on his legs, which suggested that his disease,AIDS, was no longer dormant.
In his 20-square-meter room there was a desk and two wooden beds, on one of which lay his blind wife. These were all he could leave for his three sons.
Qubisuobu had a decent job from a local lumber yard. In 1995, some of his fellow villagers who worked out of the county went back. When they got together, they offered him cigarettes.
"At first I didn't know that they put drugs into the cigarettes to give them 'a better taste'," he said. Three months later, Qubisuobu found himself addicted.
Drugs cost him his fortune. "I would even take away the eggs just laid by the hen to exchange for drugs," he recalled.
During a medical check in 2002, Qubisuobu was found infected. His wife Liewuguoguo became so desperate that she drank pesticide to kill herself. While she was finally saved, she had become blind.
Drugs and AIDS brought the family stigma.
People from the Yi minority group respect relatives, but Qubisuobu was expelled from the clan. Also, his fellow villagers looked down upon him. "When the local government sent me relief food, they gossiped scornfully," he said.
What hurt the man more was that his three sons were isolated, as well. His youngest son was a toddler before the age of schooling and without many playmates, he stayed at home most of the time.
Talking about the child, Qubisuobu said he had another worry.
He had no idea whether his wife was infected, as well, and the son had been born after the father found out he was infected.
He had thought of having him checked, but "the hospital which could offer the examination was too far away".
In fact, there was another reason for his reluctance: he was afraid that the boy might be found to be HIV positive.
The father kept repeating that the young son shared something in common with him. "When it rains, we both felt pain in the joints," he said, weeping.
The Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, which administers Zhaojue, is next to Yunnan Province and borders the Golden Triangle. Since 1995 when the first HIV positive case was found from a drug abuser who was sent back from Yunnan, the prefecture, with 4.73 million people as of 2009, has recorded 20,856 cases of HIV infection by October this year, with 1,474 deaths.
Of note, a thorough screening is extremely difficult as funds are limited and roads are poor in the mountainous region. But local officials generally agree that the real number of HIV infection cases could be much larger.
Drug abuse was recognized as a major cause of the infection, said Xu Wenqing, an AIDS program officer with the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). When several people shared syringes to inject themselves with drugs, one's blood on the needle could be injected into another one's body. The virus is then spread with the blood.
Statistics from health authorities showed that about 80 percent of the infections were the result of drug abuse.
The prefecture recorded 11,262 drug abusers as of September last year, among whom 83 percent were young people between 18 and 35.
Sexual transmission of HIV is also on the rise. According to Jin Sheng, vice director of the Health Bureau of the Zhaojue County, most of the HIV infected people in the prefecture are young and middle-aged men.
"The Yi people in the rural area had the tradition of free pre-marital sex," he said. "Many people hadn't developed the habit of using condoms, even after their partners were already infected."
Also, with less education, they had little knowledge about AIDS, said Jin Sheng.
The official gave an example: he asked a woman from the Sikai Village of the county why would she marry a man infected with HIV? The woman responded that she would marry him because he had a government subsidy.
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