Closed School, Closed Minds

• Share

China may finally be coming clean about its burgeoning AIDS problem, but health officials in the ravaged province of Henan are still behaving as if the epidemic were a dirty secret. Last month, more than 100 armed police stormed the NGO-run Orchid Orphan School in the city of Shangqiu, a boarding school for AIDS orphans (some of whom are HIV-positive), and whisked the students away on a truck. Two volunteers were detained for "causing social disorder." The local health bureau says the school was closed because it never applied for an operating license. But school founder Li Dan says he applied repeatedly. He suspects the school was shuttered because it was getting publicity. "The minds of the local Henan officials are very closed," says Wan Yanhai, a Beijing AIDS activist. "Their first impulse is to suppress information."

Case in point: even though international estimates put Henan's HIV patient count at more than 1 million, a provincial health official told a Bangkok AIDS conference last month that there were only about 50,000 sufferers. Despite a decree from Premier Wen Jiabao that poor peasants should receive free treatment, a dozen HIV-positive villagers told TIME they had never received any medicine. Last week, 130 Henan peasants congregated in front of a local mayor's office to demand treatment. Li Dan also lodged a formal complaint with the Shangqiu health bureau asking for his orphan school to be reopened, but he's not hopeful. "They told me they didn't need any NGO help," recalls Li. "They said they could take care of the AIDS problem themselves."