Studies / Reports: February 2009 Archives

By Jill McGivering | BBC World News
February 18, 2009

Chinese officials have said that HIV/Aids was the leading cause of death last year, compared with other infectious diseases.

It is thought to be the first time this has happened.

A report by the country's state media said HIV/Aids had led to the deaths of almost 7,000 people in the first nine months of 2008.

The number of deaths caused by tuberculosis and rabies fell back into second and third place.

The numbers are increasing dramatically - China's Ministry of Health say that until three years ago, fewer than 8,000 people altogether had died from HIV/Aids.

By last year, the total had risen to five times that many.

Data on HIV in China are still unreliable. Official reporting of cases does seem to have improved.

The central authorities seem more willing to recognise HIV as a public health crisis and address it with education campaigns.

But there are still concerns that officials at local and provincial level are under-reporting, either by mistake or because they think it's not in their interest to show rises.

This latest news comes as the spread of HIV in China has entered a dangerous new phase.

Initially it was concentrated in high-risk populations, injecting drug users in particular.

Infection from contaminated blood transfusions was also common.

More sex

But now the main cause of transmission is thought to be unsafe sex.

China is still a deeply conservative society - but it is also going through a period of rapid social change.

Greater freedom of movement means millions of migrant workers have left small communities to enjoy the anonymity of cities.

Male workers, away from their families, have more sexual opportunity.

Prostitution has increased. Premarital sex is also becoming more acceptable.

On Tuesday, the World Health Organisation warned of a steep rise in HIV amongst Asian men who have sex with men, unless prevention programmes targeting them were greatly improved.

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By Austin Ramzy | TIME Magazine in Partnership with CNN
February 13, 2009

One thing is certain about avian influenza: it's deadly. Of the three people who contracted the H5N1 strain of the virus in China last year, three died. In the first six weeks of 2009, eight people have come down with bird flu and five have died. Another thing is that -- while the disease has yet to go pandemic as many doctors fear it could -- it remains worryingly persistent. Every year since 2003, about 100 people in Asia, the Middle East and Africa contract the disease. Last year, in a rare exception, the number dropped below 50.

But bird flu, it seems, is back. This year, China has already recorded eight human cases of the disease. Last month five people died in locations as far removed from each other as Beijing in the north, Xinjiang in the west, Guangxi in the south, Hunan in the center and Shandong in the east -- and one of the highest tallies of bird flu deaths China has ever recorded in a month. "From a disease-control perspective, the increase in cases in China is notable -- as is the wide geographic spread," says Dr. Hans Troedsson, the World Health Organization's representative in China. There is still no evidence that the virus has mutated to spread easily between humans, he says. But while such a nightmare scenario, which could set off a global flu pandemic that could kill millions, has shown no signs of being an immediate threat, serious concerns remain. "The fact that this is the highest number for a single month in China reminds us that the virus is entrenched and circulating in the environment," Troedsson says.

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By Sharon LaFraniere | THE NEW YORK TIMES
February 06, 2009

Nearly nine months after a devastating earthquake in Sichuan Province, China, left 80,000 people dead or missing, a growing number of American and Chinese scientists are suggesting that the calamity was triggered by a four-year-old reservoir built close to the earthquake's geological fault line.

A Columbia University scientist who studied the quake has said that it may have been triggered by the weight of 320 million tons of water in the Zipingpu Reservoir less than a mile from a well-known major fault. His conclusions, presented to the American Geophysical Union in December, coincide with a new finding by Chinese geophysicists that the dam caused significant seismic changes before the earthquake.

Scientists emphasize that the link between the dam and the failure of the fault has not been conclusively proved, and that even if the dam acted as a trigger, it would only have hastened a quake that would have occurred at some point.

Nonetheless, any suggestion that a government project played a role in one of the biggest natural disasters in recent Chinese history is likely to be politically explosive.

The issue of government accountability and responsiveness has boiled over in China in the past year. The grieving parents of thousands of schoolchildren killed in the disaster have already made the 7.9-magnitude earthquake a political issue, charging that children died needlessly in unsafe school buildings approved by negligent or corrupt officials.

More public anger erupted last year when the government failed to prevent the sale of tainted milk powder that sickened nearly 300,000 children and killed six.

"Any kind of government-related disaster presently is very, very damaging and politically extremely sensitive," said Cheng Li, the China research director at the Brookings Institution.

If it is proved that the earthquake "was related to a man-made situation and not just a natural disaster, the government will be very uncomfortable with that kind of report because of the whole issue of government accountability," Mr. Li said.

Questions about the Zipingpu Dam are especially delicate because China is building many major hydroelectric dams in the southwest, a region which has abundant water resources but is considered prone to earthquakes.

In a petition to the government in July, a group of environmentalists and scholars said the fact that government scientists had underestimated the risk of the May earthquake raised questions about a host of other dams built in the same valley and along five other major rivers, according to an article published by Probe International, an environmental advocacy group. Chinese authorities have steadfastly dismissed any notion that reservoir-building in Sichuan Province placed citizens at any added risk, and they have blocked some Web sites of environmental groups that suggest that dangers have been overlooked.

In a December article in the Chinese magazine Science Times, two scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences strongly denied that the dam played any role in the earthquake. "The earthquake research community outside and inside China has widely accepted the notion that the May 12 Wenchuan earthquake was a huge natural disaster caused by massive crustal movement, because no reservoir triggered-quake with a magnitude eight has ever occurred in history," said Pan Jiazheng, an expert in hydroengineering, according to a translation published by Probe International.

Scientists generally agree that a reservoir, no matter how big, cannot by itself cause an earthquake. But Leonardo Seeber, a senior scientist with the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, said the impact of so much water could hasten an earthquake's occurrence if geological conditions for a quake already existed. He said the best known example was a 1967 earthquake triggered by the Koyna Dam in a remote area of India, with a magnitude of about 6.5 and a death toll of about 180 people.

Mr. Seeber said that while the link between the Sichuan earthquake and the Zipingpu Dam was not yet proved, work by Christian Klose, a Columbia University researcher specializing in geophysical hazards, suggested the stress caused by the water's weight might have hastened the quake by a few hundred years.

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