Why the plagues in China

[stratego]

Why does China all of a sudden have all these plagues. First SARS. But almost as soon as SARS was declared under control the bird flu comes along. Now that the bird flu epidemic is over they have this.

Officials say most China provinces could have AIDS from blood selling

BEIJING (AFP) - Most provinces in China could be affected by HIV (news - web sites)/AIDS (news - web sites) outbreaks from unsanitary blood sales, officials say, highlighting that Beijing does not know the extent of the epidemic it is grappling with.

Chinese and US officials said most areas of China likely have farmers infected with HIV/AIDS from selling blood in government-backed schemes which operated until the mid-1990s when they were banned.

"Every province in China has this problem from blood sales," a health official from China's northernmost Heilongjiang province told AFP at a gathering to launch a US-China joint AIDS prevention program Tuesday.

China's Ministry of Health had previously said the scandal affected mainly central China, particularly Henan and Anhui provinces.

Another Heilongjiang official told AFP two farmers in the province recently died from AIDS after selling blood for years.

"It's definitely not only two people," said Wu Yuhua, deputy director of the Heilongjiang Center for Disease Control and Prevention (news - web sites)'s Viral Disease Prevention Research Institute.

"We don't know how many others have AIDS from selling blood. We haven't done a study."

Wu said blood collecting was something practically the whole country was involved in because plasma was needed to make blood products.

"Now we're at a peak period. It takes eight to 10 years for the symptoms to show. People are dying now," Wu said. "In the whole country, this will be a problem."

A Ministry of Health official at the launching ceremony admitted the central government simply did not know how widespread infections were.

"We can't say other provinces definitely do not have infections from blood sales," said Qi Xiaoqiu, director general of the ministry's department of disease control.

"All we can say is there are some places where it's rather clear that they don't have such cases, such as Tibet and Beijing. But as for the other areas, basically, we're not really clear."

Ray Yip, director of the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention which is running a US-China AIDS program, said AIDS from blood selling was likely concentrated in central China, but most provinces in China have been affected.

"They might not have the same level like in Henan (province), but most provinces have some," Yip said.

Farmers who travelled from one part of the country to another to sell blood became infected and spread the disease, Yip said.

"I have known people for example in (southwestern China's) Guizhou province, who were organized by people to take them by train to go to Henan to sell blood for two weeks and they sell every day," Yip said.

He said no one, including the Chinese government, knew how many people contracted HIV through this method, and stressed the need to find HIV carriers to help them stay alive longer and prevent further transmissions.

"Heilongjiang right now can only find maybe two dozen cases... But the question is, do they actually have dozens of cases they don't know about?" Yip said.

China claims 20 percent of its estimated 840,000 HIV/AIDS patients got the disease from selling plasma, but international experts believe the total number of cases and number of people infected through blood sales is far higher.

Link

 

[Bozo Erectus]

Ive been wondering the same thing myself. Maybe since the largest single group of people on the planet live in China, chances are things like new diseases will happen to them more often?

 

[The Last Conformist]

Southern China is a leading source of influenzas, since it has hundreds of millions of chickens and other birds living very close to hundreds of millions of people.

In addition, the Chinese national health system isn't the best in the world.

Add that China is becoming more open, so we here more of things going on there that the regime would have suppressed in the past, and bit of random clustering, and I don't think there's anything remarkable at all.

 

[stormbind]

Afaik, Hong Kong didn't suffer these problems when it was British. Has to have been a recent change to the local environments.

 

[Achinz]

The hypothesis is that humans live in close proximity to the birds among many other animals which are a source of food. With the density of population in provinces such of Guangdong, there is a high probability of pathogenic microorganism esp viruses jumping the species barrier. Just birds in this case instead of say rats.

 

[Goober]

Because China has the most % of the world's population, all densely packed into large cities, the potential for diseases like SARs, AIDS, Avian Flu to spread are much greater because of the sheer amount of peole per square mile, etc. But not only that, other countries have a greater population per square mile or whatever, it is the fact that China is not the best country in the terms of sanitation, their government is not terribly well organized (DO NOT TURN THIS INTO YET ANOTHER COMMUNISM VS. CAPITALISM THREAD!!!), etc. For these reasons, diseases seem to be able to spread rampantly, yet kill very little of China's population.

The situation is improving, in the long run, as the country slowly modernizes, and opens up to the world (do not go on about communism is bad, please people . . . ), they have the world peering in, and so they try harder to stop these kinds of plagues, etc. Better sanitation, etc. will lead to these plagues not spreading as fast, therefore not happening quite as frequently.

[/ramble]

 

[thestonesfan]

I'm acutally suprised they don't have more.

 

[Goober]

Originally posted by thestonesfan
I'm acutally suprised they don't have more.

They probably do, but we just do not hear about them. China did not admit to having SARS foir a few days there, and that probably helped it spread. Communists aren't great for spreading truthful information all over the place. (don't start, please. We have had enough Communism vs. Capitalism threads, thank you very much . . . )

 

[cgannon64]

I know a Chinese kid who told me that "Chinese + Cold = SARS! We're ticking time bombs!"

I'll take his word for it.

 

[Sarevok]

typically plagues start in china

 

[stormbind]

Originally posted by RealGoober
We have had enough Communism vs. Capitalism threads, thank you very much . . .

Then by now you should know that Communism is not the inverse of Capitalism!

The inverse would be Socialism which is not Communism but I don't need to explain because I'm sure you remember reading the details in those other threads. What you probably meant to say is Communism vs Democracy, perhaps? Humn... now I'm confused

 

[stormbind]

I understand the theory re: population density.

However, Hong Kong did not experience plague under British rule and that was relatively recent with the same kinds of population levels. This puts huge doubt over the theory that the plagues were always there and just not reported

There must be another explanation. Put asside the reasons for rapid "spreading" and concentrate on the "causes" of original infection (aka ground zero?)

 

[Goober]

Originally posted by stormbind
Then by now you should know that Communism is not the inverse of Capitalism!

The inverse would be Socialism which is not Communism but I don't need to explain because I'm sure you remember reading the details in those other threads. What you probably meant to say is Communism vs Democracy, perhaps? Humn... now I'm confused

What the . . .

I never stated Inverse, and ya, Democracy would probably have worked better. Meh. Same Difference. Please, let us not dive back into Democracy/Capitalism vs. Communism . . . not again . . .

And i have been confused for a LOT longer then you have, even though I am likely younger. In fact, I came pre-confused!!!

 

[The Person]

All statements listed until now are valid statements. And here's my guess:

Maybe they've just been unfortunate?

 

[lz14]

SARS was unfortunate.

Bird flu did not start from China, it spreaded there very quickly, it's the bird/population density.

AIDS/HIV has been there for some time. It's the imcompetence of the Chinese rural health system.

 

[Eastern Knight]

:sigh: ..... Some disastrous years....

 

[Knight-Dragon]

IIRC SARS and the more recent bird flu started in Vietnam and spread to China as well as other nations in the region...

Also the late 90s bird flu started off in Hong Kong.

We, over here, prefer to work on solutions than point fingers and pushing the blame around. At least, that's what I hope the people in govts are doing.

At present, there's an outbreak of dengue fever in Indonesia - hundreds had died I think. So, China is in no sense unique.

 

[Stapel]

A scientifically backed up article in 'De Volkskrant', a slightly to the left Dutch quality paper, from a year ago had a very interesting thesis:

The Great Plague, that started in Europe in the 14th century, and ended in London in the 17th century, killed one quarter of the European population. It was probably brought to Europe by Mongols, but it appears South-East Asia was never visited by this nasty disease.

In Europe, most people that are sensitive for these types of flues have stopped living and reproducing. In South East Asia they are still there.

This thesis cannot be proven nor disproven. IIRC, we do not know what virus was exactly around in the 14th century.

Anyway: thesis seems plausibel and very interesting.

 

[Bozo Erectus]

I thought the plague started in Europe when a ship full of infected sailors landed in Florence?

 

[The Last Conformist]

RealGoober: Actually, if all those Chinese really did live in big cities, they'd likely have less flu epidemics, because chief reason for frequent flus is a very dense rural population living in close contact with huge numbers of birds.

Stapel: The bubonic plage, of which the Blach Death is generally believed to have been an outbreak of, killed millions of millions of people in southern Asia in the 19th C. The disease has killed sufficient numbers of Europeans in the last 100 years to disprove any hypothesis we're immune to it, altho we likely still have greater resistance to it than our ancestors in the 14th C had on average. 25% of Europe's population would be a lowish estimate of the death toll of the Black Death proper, but the later outbreaks took much smaller tolls.

As an aside, the epidemic seems to've been even more devastating in the Mid East, an continued to press down populations for much longer. Some historians believe this was an important factor in the changing balance of power in the mediterranean basin from the 15th C onwards.

Dumb Pothead: No-one knows where the Black Death started, but the null hypothesis must be Central Asia, since that's the homeland of the rodents that are the normal hosts of Yersinia pestis. It first made itself heard of in the Crimea, from which it quickly spread not only to Italy, but to entire Mediterranean basin, thanks to the good trade routes. By contrast, it failed to spread NW thru the Ukraine - Poland was only reached years later, and from the west.