China Development Brief - Health

AIDS: Anger and recrimination block progress in Henan

Sun, 20 Jan 2008 10:35:16 +0000

AIDS activists in China remain angry at what they see as the culpability and inaction of authorities in Henan Province, while government officials there remain implacably hostile to people they see as troublemakers. Nevertheless, reports Nick Young with Mian Liping (勉丽萍), things are changing in Henan, but the stand-off between government and citizen activists seems to be delaying the kind of progress that has been seen in neighbouring Anhui.

“Things haven’t changed that much in Henan,” Dr. Gao Yaojie (高耀洁) tells us. “The government has created model areas to show it’s doing something, but there are still counties that are not open (公开) and where they get nothing.”

Editorial: Riots underline development dilemmas

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 06:14:45 +0100

Violent protests this month in Guangxi’s Bobai (博白) County—sparked, according to international press reports, by heavy-handed implementation of birth control rules—are a tragic reminder of the pain caused by a policy that has, nevertheless, played a key role in China’s social and economic transformation.

HIV/AIDS: NGOs proliferate as the Global Fund steps in

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 06:16:27 +0100

Although not an HIV hotspot, over the last three years China’s north-eastern province of Heilongjiang has seen a surge of local NGOs working on AIDS prevention. But, Nick Young and Mian Liping (勉丽萍) ask, is this a civil society success story or an opportunistic response to the influx of international funds?

HARBIN Away from the bright lights of Gogol Street, the main entertainment strip in this northern industrial city with historic ties to Russia, a Saturday night crowd has gathered in a downmarket bathhouse that caters for MSM—“men who have sex with men.”

Book casts light on hidden world of male sex workers

Wed, 23 May 2007 06:42:41 +0100

An Inquiry into Commercial Sex in the Community of Men Who Have Sex with Men in China (中国男男性交易状态调查) Tong Ge (童戈), Beijing Gender Health Education Institute (北京纪安德咨询中心) March, 2007

NGO report damns campus health, disability discrimination

Wed, 23 May 2007 06:41:28 +0100

Discrimination against students with medical conditions is rife in Chinese colleges and universities despite being formally prohibited by China’s Constitution and various related laws, according to a report published by three NGOs.

Hong Kong group extends safety, rehabilitation training for factory workers

Thu, 12 Apr 2007 04:17:54 +0100

A non-profit Workers’ Health Centre, established in 1984 by Hong Kong medical, rehabilitation and occupational health and safety (OHS) professionals, is scaling up efforts to prevent occupational illnesses on China’s mainland through workplace assessments and trainings for factory workers and management staff.

ILO, Labour Ministry, plan AIDS education for migrant workers

Mon, 29 Jan 2007 10:20:14 +0000

The International Labour Organisation and China’s Ministry of Labour and Social Security have launched a USD 3.5 million HIV/AIDS Workplace Education Project funded by the United States Department of Labor as part of a global initiative, it was announced last week.

Drop in maternal and child mortality slow and uneven

Thu, 18 Jan 2007 03:55:47 +0000

Although overall maternal and child mortality rates are continuing to fall in China, the decline is slower than would normally be expected of a country experiencing such robust economic growth, and there is very wide variation between rates in urban and outlying, rural areas, according to a Joint Review of the Maternal and Child Survival Strategy in China published in December by Unicef, UNFPA, WHO and the Ministry of Health.

Where the doctor can’t help

Wed, 08 Nov 2006 02:12:57 +0000

Self-help groups of people living with incurable illnesses or disability provide an invaluable forum for information sharing and personal support. But although they are appearing in China, as Chang Tianle (常天乐) reports, their growth is hampered by problems of legal status and fundraising.

“You cannot fix this [health] system in three or four years”

Thu, 02 Nov 2006 07:45:46 +0000

Since the shock of SARS in 2003, the government of China has invested heavily in public health programmes to strengthen control of infectious diseases, WHO China representative, Henk Bekedam , tells Nick Young in the following interview. However, he cautions, the health system as a whole still has grave, structural problems; Rural Cooperative Medical Schemes that are now being rolled out are unlikely to guarantee universal access to basic services; and until the government decides what its role in the health sector should be it will find it hard to create efficient and effective regulatory frameworks for quality and cost control.

Hepatitis B stigma provokes outcry in Xinjiang

Tue, 07 Nov 2006 06:25:43 +0000

Despite central directives to discourage discrimination against the tens of millions of people infected with Hepatitis B, old habits die hard in Xinjiang where parents are taking legal action against education authorities for barring their children from a coveted educational opportunity, and where a local NGO that broke the news to media has met with a stern response. Chang Tianle (常天乐) reports.

‘Public-private partnership’ to quell TB, AIDS, among migrant workers

Tue, 12 Sep 2006 20:27:12 +0100

Businesses, government departments, NGOs and multilateral agencies have signed up to a China Health Alliance that will “educate, test, treat and support Chinese company employees, especially migrant workers, at risk of TB and AIDS,” according to the World Economic Forum, which launched the Alliance on September 11 during the second day of a Forum summit in Beijing.

Governance spat plagues coordinating board of Global Fund, divides NGOs

Wed, 31 May 2006 16:47:47 +0100

An increasingly heated dispute has broken out over local NGO representation on China’s “Country Coordinating Mechanism” for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which has so far provided more than USD 190 million for AIDS prevention and care programmes in China.

First Person: "I underestimated the difficulty of claiming rights"

Fri, 09 Jun 2006 08:07:47 +0100

Village doctor Zhang Changjian (张长建) has just had his clinic closed by local authorities. His offence? A decade of activism, trying to draw government and media attention to a wave of illness that, he claims, is caused by a local chemical plant. Tina Qian (钱霄峰) listened to his story.

Feature: Sexual health NGO steps in where the state declines to tread

Tue, 09 May 2006 07:07:32 +0100

Twenty five years of strict birth control have, according to the government of China, prevented 300 million new births. Yet the state offers family planning services only to married couples, neglecting a large population of sexually active but in the main ill-informed young people, among whom sexually transmitted infections and unwanted pregnancies appear to be rising fast. Tina Qian visited the booming cities of Qingdao and Nanjing, to see how Marie Stopes International is attempting to fill this service gap while also working with Jiangsu provincial authorities to improve service delivery within the state system.