Even in villages where there was no blood selling, you now can find cases through migration, marriage and sexual transmission. There are no AIDS orphans, villagers say, but that will come soon. Despite the long-playing tragedy, villagers said they had not yet been visited by health officials from Beijing or the provincial capital, Zhengzhou. In fact, they have not even seen officials from the county seat, Xincai. Doctors and nurses at Xincai's hospital, Nanguan Yiyuan, dispense medicine to treat the symptoms of a disease they poorly understand.
Patients die painful deaths with minimal care.
Health officials in the province often became middlemen, setting up blood-collection stations. Some profited personally while others saw it as a harmless way to bring cash into a destitute region with few resources. Three blood-collection stations operated in Xincai, villagers say, run by locals but backed as business ventures by government sponsors. Because of the collection methods routinely used at the time throughout China, even those who donated only a few times ran a high risk of becoming ill, experts said. The remaining fraction, mainly red cells, was divided up and transfused back into the sellers, who believed the process healthy because it limited the blood loss.