Claim: China's blood donations dry up as coronavirus outbreak quells giving.
Verdict: SUPPORTS

Retrieved passages:
title: Health in China
text: could give blood up to 11 times a day. The disaster was only recognized in 2000 and found out abroad in 2001. Pensioner Gao Yaojie sold her house to deliver data leaflets of HIV to people, while officials tried to prevent her. Some local officials and politicians were involved in the blood sale. In 2003 only 2.6% of Chinese knew that a condom could protect from AIDS. China blocked by police protest over ineffective drug treatments, cancelled meetings on HIV groups, closured office of the AIDS organization, and detained or put under house arrest prominent AIDS activists such as 2005

title: HIV/AIDS in China
text: for leaking an internal government report on the Henan AIDS crisis. In early December 2006, it was reported that a group of 19 people who contracted HIV from tainted blood transfusions at a hospital in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang were awarded 20 million yuan (US$2.5 million) in compensation. The landmark case involves the largest single group stricken by HIV in China. Eighteen of the victims will receive a one-off payment of $25,500 from the hospital and additional monthly payments of $380. Payment will go to the family of the one victim who has already died from AIDS. The process

title: Gao Yaojie
text: HIV virus during the 1990s among the impoverished rural population who sold blood at unsanitary Henan provincial and private collection centers where blood was collected from paid blood donors into a central tank, the plasma separated out, and the remainder of the blood pumped back from the central tank into the donors of the same blood type. Gao is well known in China and worldwide for her AIDS prevention work in during the HIV epidemic in Henan, and for advocating much greater attention to people suffering from AIDS and children orphaned by AIDS. Gao is well known for her writings

title: HIV/AIDS in China
text: the needs of former plasma donors in the early stages of the epidemic. Moreover, the distribution of HIV in China is not even, and is concentrated in areas with high drug use (e.g., Yunnan, Guangxi, Xinjiang, and Sichuan) and in areas where people were infected through unsafe blood or plasma donation (e.g., Henan, Anhui, Hebei, Shanxi, and Hubei). The number of cases ranges dramatically between provinces, with, for example, just 20 cases reported from Tibet but well over 40,000 in neighboring Yunnan. In provinces with an extremely low prevalence, it can be difficult for officials to see the need for

title: HIV/AIDS in China
text: regulations on the collection and management of blood and blood products, provision of HIV testing, prevention, and care for donors in the local areas was slower. Progress was stimulated by the media's attention to the plight of the infected plasma donors. Since these initial reports, the HIV/AIDS situation in China has received much attention from the local and international media. Chinese-American director Ruby Yang has recently made a documentary about AIDS in rural China, which premiered on 14 June 2006, entitled "The Blood of Yingzhou District". An abridged version of Robert Bilheimer's acclaimed US-made 2003 documentary "A Closer Walk" was

title: Wang Keqin
text: exposing the "stranglehold" that Chinese taxi companies have on their drivers. This influenced Premier Wen Jiabao to order a cleanup of the taxi industry. On November 30, 2005, Wang published a story about an AIDS epidemic in the Henan province caused by poor sterilization of needles when collecting paid blood donations. On March 8, 2010, he and a student were physically and verbally attacked while trying to visit Yuan Weijing, wife of imprisoned civil and political rights activist Chen Guangcheng. As a result, Reporters Without Borders urged the Shandong provincial government to investigate the incident and stop it from reoccurring

title: Kilgour–Matas report
text: on 6 July 2006, Chinese officials declared that China abides by World Health Organization principles that prohibit the sale of human organs without written consent from donors. They denounced the report as smears "based on rumours and false allegations", and said the Chinese government had already investigated the claims and found them without any merit. The report is banned in Russia and China. Among international concerns, the US National Kidney Foundation expressed that it was "deeply concerned" about the allegations. In 2009, the authors published an updated version of the report as a book, titled "Bloody Harvest, The killing of

title: HIV/AIDS in China
text: their sexual partners and children. In the mid-1990s, the occurrence of a second major outbreak in commercial plasma donors in the east-central provinces became apparent. Plasma donors were paid to donate blood, the plasma removed, then the red blood cells reinfused to prevent anaemia. Reuse of tubing and mixing during collection and reinfusion led to thousands of new infections. At the same time, HIV was also spreading through sexual transmission. By 1998, HIV had reached all 31 provinces and was in a phase of exponential growth, which, by 2005, had culminated in an estimated 650,000 infections.<ref name="MoH/UNAIDS/WHO/2005/update/2006">Ministry of Health of

title: 3 Needles
text: a rite of passage symbolizing their change from boyhood into manhood. In rural China, a heavily pregnant Jin Ping is caught by Chinese military men with crates of black market blood in her van. The blood is destroyed and she is subsequently gang raped. Jin Ping is then shown visiting a village and convincing the inhabitants to give blood for $5 each. They all agree, except Tong Sam, a rice farmer, as he is unable to give blood as he is sick. However, as Jin Ping's equipment is not safe, most of the people in the village contract HIV and

title: Plasma Economy
text: is estimated that by 2003, over 1.2 million people had contracted AIDS in Henan Province alone. "Caijing" noted that China's blood donation system is largely monetarily driven, and while attempts had been made in the 1980s to move to a voluntary system, they were mostly unsuccessful. In the early 1990s, China restricted the import of blood products, while called for local investment by foreign pharmaceutical companies, especially to the province of Henan, where numerous plasmapheresis stations were built. The selling of blood plasma were seen by locals as a method to reduce poverty. In plasmapheresis, blood plasma is taken from

title: And the Band Played On
text: Food and Drug Administration (FDA), that blood bank industry leaders acknowledged that HIV could be transmitted through blood transfusions. Shilts' coverage revealed the feeling among blood bank industry leaders that screening donors for hepatitis alone might offend the donors, and that the cost of screening all the blood donations provided across the country every year was too high to be feasible. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the agency responsible for tracking down and reporting all communicable diseases in the U.S., faced governmental apathy in the face of mounting crisis. Shilts reported how CDC epidemiologists forged ahead blindly after being

title: Red Cross Society of China
text: sides of the Taiwan Strait. In 2008, the RCSC received 1.537 billion yuan (about 220 million US dollars) in donations from both domestic and overseas sources, nine times the figure of 2007. Ninety percent of the donation was received for disaster-relief work in Sichuan and other quake-hit areas in China, while the Red Cross Angel Program, which provides medical aid to poor areas, received 104 million yuan, and the Bo'Ai Aid Program for poor students received 36.95 million. The Angel Program helped to train 400 rural doctors, and provided aid to about 7,800 people with leukemia, congenital heart disease, cleft

title: Gao Yaojie
text: of her patient. For several consecutive days, Gao had no appetite and slept poorly. And the worst thing was that patient's blood transfusion came from an infected blood bank, which meant she was the tip of an iceberg that had just emerged from the water and even more lives would be lost if no measures were taken to stem the spread of HIV. In the meantime, Gao also noticed that in the two years from the patient's infection to her death, none of her family was infected, proving the possibility of successful control of the spread of the disease. But

title: Fuyang
text: caused mainly by gross mismanagement, using the expression, "Three parts natural disaster and seven parts man-made disaster." In the 1990s, commercial blood selling schemes led to entire villages in Henan and Anhui being infected with the HIV virus. The government in Fuyang, which at that time was headed by Wang Huaizhong (王怀忠), encouraged rural villagers to sell blood as a way to supplement their income. The blood collectors would often draw too much blood, causing their feet to go numb, and sometimes people were even hung upside down against a wall to force blood to flow back into their arms.

title: HIV/AIDS in China
text: to maximize their income, and the mixing the blood prior to centrifuging and re-injecting the separated red blood cells back into the peasant blood-sellers guaranteed the rapid spread of blood-borne diseases such as HIV and Hepatitis B. Particularly in the province of Henan, tens of thousands of farmers and peasants were infected with HIV through participation in these programs. On August 23, 2001, the Chinese government admitted that 30,000-50,000 Chinese people could have been infected with HIV through illegal blood collections and sales. On August 24, 2002, the whistleblower Wan Yanhai was arrested in Beijing and detained for a month

title: Healthcare in China
text: unsanitary practices used in the collection of blood in rural areas. The problem with tobacco is complicated by the concentration of most cigarette sales in a government controlled monopoly. The government, dependent on tobacco revenue, seems hesitant in its response and may even encourage it as seen from government websites. Hepatitis B infection is widespread in mainland China, with about 10% of the population contracting the disease. Some hepatitis researchers link hepatitis infections to a lower ratio of female births. If this link is confirmed, this would partially explain China's gender imbalance. A program initiated in 2002 will attempt over

title: Blood donation
text: donors is from equipment that has not been properly sterilized. In most cases, the equipment that comes in direct contact with blood is discarded after use. Re-used equipment was a significant problem in China in the 1990s, and up to 250,000 blood plasma donors may have been exposed to HIV from shared equipment. The collected blood is usually stored in a blood bank as separate components, and some of these have short shelf lives. There are no storage solutions to keep platelets for extended periods of time, though some are being studied as of 2008. The longest shelf life used

title: Plasma Economy
text: its blood donors being infected with AIDS, while in the village of Wenlou, over 65% of its residents had contracted HIV. HIV/AIDS activist Yan Lianke's 2005 book "Dream of Ding Village" is based on the incident. Plasma Economy Plasma Economy () was a 1991-1995 plasmapheresis campaign by the Henan provincial government in China, in which blood plasma were extracted in exchange for money. The campaign attracted 3 million donors of mostly rural Chinese, and it is estimated at least 40% of the blood donors subsequently contracted HIV. The Plasma Economy campaign boomed due to demand by biotech companies, and became

title: The Blood of Yingzhou District
text: those being diagnosed were intravenous drug users, and it was also common for new cases to be in the Yunnan among sex workers, people seeking treatment for sexually transmitted diseases, and Chinese people who had been employed abroad. Unfortunately, by 1998 AIDS had spread beyond coastal cities and Yunnan to all the regions of China. In the 1950s, the Chinese government established a blood donation system in the Henan Province. This system helped the government since it allowed the government to create revenue for rural health care, and in the 1990s the system helped them deal with a financial shortfall

title: HIV/AIDS in China
text: travel by Dr. Gao Yaojie, a Henan activist, have been cited in news reports. The country's best-known AIDS activist, Wan Yanhai, believes China suffers 10 times the number of HIV cases – 650,000 – estimated by health officials. From the early to mid-1990s a network of businessmen and government workers, known as "bloodheads", set up hundreds of official and unofficial blood donation stations in Henan Province to supply the market for blood plasma created by hospitals and manufacturers of health products. The common practice of reusing needles, not screening for diseases, sellers traveling from station to station with false records