Divine retribution 天灭中共

A Mysterious Virus in Central China Has Infected Dozens, Raising Fears of a New Epidemic. Here's What to Know
By Hillary Leung / Hong Kong,
An unidentified form of pneumonia has broken out in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, prompting authorities to quarantine those infected and raise hospital alerts.
Wuhan’s health bureau announced Sunday that close to 60 patients have been diagnosed with the virus, and neighboring Hong Kong has announced suspected cases. (A suspected case in Singapore turned out to be a false alarm.)
The mysterious strain has been linked to a seafood market which has been closed for sanitation since Jan. 1.
Medical experts are attempting to identify the illness.
While they say it is unlikely that this new strain of pneumonia could cause a repeat of 2003’s deadly SARS outbreak in 2003, which killed hundreds in mainland China and spread as far as the U.S. and Canada, they stress that vigilance should not be relaxed.
Here’s what to know about the virus.

How serious is the pneumonia outbreak?
According to Wuhan’s health bureau, 59 patients have been diagnosed with the virus, including seven in critical condition as of Sunday.
Some of the patients operated stalls at the seafood market.
All of the patients are in quarantine, and 163 people who had been in close contact with them have been placed under medical observation.
The World Health Organization says symptoms include fever and difficulty breathing.

How fast is it spreading?
The first case was discovered in Wuhan on Dec. 12, the city’s health bureau says.
On Sunday, authorities in Hong Kong reported that nine more patients were found to have fever or respiratory symptoms after returning from Wuhan, bringing the number of cases in the city to 17.

How are authorities outside China responding?
Governments are stepping up precautionary measures in the wake of the outbreak.
Hong Kong’s Hospital Authority has imposed shorter visiting hours at hospitals and is requiring all visitors to wear face masks.
The city has also enhanced the airport’s thermal imaging system to screen the temperatures of travelers coming from Wuhan.
Additional manpower has been assigned to the train station that connects the city to mainland China to carry out temperature checks.
Singapore’s Ministry of Health announced Thursday that it is implementing temperature screenings for travelers arriving on flights from Wuhan.
Taiwan’s Centers for Disease Control has asked doctors and airport quarantine officials to notify the bureau of patients who have traveled to Wuhan and exhibit any symptoms.
The World Health Organization (WHO) says it is monitoring the situation and “in close contact with national authorities in China.”

Could this evolve into a large-scale outbreak like SARS?
Wuhan’s health bureau said that the viral pneumonia is not SARS, MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) or bird flu.
It also said there is no evidence of human-to-human transmission, but medical experts have expressed their reservations.
“They did not exclude this possibility completely,” Leo Poon, a virologist and SARS expert at the University of Hong Kong, tells TIME.
Still, the fact that there have not been any deaths so far — 10% of those who contracted SARS in 2003 died — is reason to believe that the outbreak will not take a more serious turn, Poon adds.
Yuen Kwok-yung, a microbiologist at the University of Hong Kong, says there have been marked advances in scientific research and laboratory diagnostic capabilities since the SARS outbreak over a decade ago.
“It is highly unlikely that this will lead to a major 2003-like epidemic,” Yuen says, “though we cannot be complacent.”

Plagues of China

China Responds Slowly, and a Pig Disease Becomes a Lethal Epidemic

The bungled effort to contain Chinese swine fever could result in higher food costs for years and shows the limits of Beijing’s top-down approach to problems.
By Keith Bradsher and Ailin Tang

Buyers and sellers at a pork wholesale market in Beijing.

WULONGQIAO, China — A devastating disease spreading from China has wiped out roughly one-quarter of the world’s pigs, reshaping farming and hitting the diets and pocketbooks of consumers around the globe.
China’s unsuccessful efforts to stop the disease may have hastened the spread — creating problems that could bedevil Beijing and global agriculture for years to come.
To halt Chinese swine fever, the authorities must persuade farmers to kill infected pigs and dispose of them properly. 

But in China, officials have been frugal to the point of stingy, requiring farmers to jump through hoops to seek compensation from often cash-poor local governments.As a result, Chinese officials are not reaching farmers like Peng Weita. 

When one of his pigs suddenly died three months ago from swine fever, he said, he quickly slaughtered his other four dozen before they could fall sick as well. 

But he buried them and took a big loss rather than reporting the deaths to the government for compensation.
“Three years of costs were all for nothing,” Mr. Peng said.
His loss was the government’s as well. 

Because he did not report the episode, local officials could not make sure he followed all the steps necessary to halt the spread, like burying carcasses a considerable distance from the farm. 

Mr. Peng said he probably buried them too close to his farm but declined to discuss details of the disposal.
The epidemic shows the limits of China’s emphasis on government-driven, top-down solutions to major problems, sometimes at the expense of the practical. 

It has also laid bare the struggle of a country of 1.4 billion people to feed itself.
China has long viewed food security as tantamount to national security. 

It had become essentially self-reliant in pork as well as in rice and wheat thanks to subsidies and aggressive farmland management. 

The swine fever epidemic will test that commitment to its increasingly affluent people, who more often expect meat at the dinner table.
The pig disease — which is not fatal to humans but can be spread by us — has now extended swiftly out of China. 

It has moved across nine other Asian countries, particularly Vietnam, which is the world’s fifth-largest pork producer and has lost much of its herd this autumn. 

Before reaching China, the disease had been slowly infecting occasional farms in Russia and elsewhere in Eastern Europe.
Powered by pork, China’s overall food prices last month were one-fifth higher than they were a year ago, after seven years of little change. 

Large purchases of pork by China are driving up live hog prices in the United States, Europe and around the globe, pushing up costs for everything from German sausages to Vietnamese pork meatballs.
Beef and lamb prices have risen as families worldwide seek alternatives, so much so that overall meat prices in international commodity markets have increased nearly 20 percent in the past year. 

Brazil is now ramping up beef and chicken production to meet demand, partly by burning forests in the Amazon to clear land for agriculture.
Workers unloading pork carcasses from trucks at a warehouse that is part of a network of China’s national pork reserve, in the outskirts of Beijing.

“The epidemic could have broad and deep economic impacts at the global level,” said Boubaker Ben Belhassen, the director of trade and markets at the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome. 

“There’s enough pork in the world to offset China’s shortfall.”

China used to have 440 million pigs — almost half the world’s population — but its herd has shrunk by half or more, according to Rabobank, a Dutch bank with a heavy agricultural focus. 

Pork prices in China have more than doubled.
The problem has become so pressing that Beijing accepted a partial trade deal with the United States last month, in part to resume imports of American food. 

Pig prices have climbed so high that one livestock company, Guangxi Yangxiang, printed red banners to recruit potential farmers that read, “Raise 10 sows and drive a BMW next year.”
Stopping the epidemic was always going to be tough. 

Small farms, often packed together in crowded agricultural areas, produce nearly half of China’s pigs. To stop diseases from spreading, Chinese officials have to reach millions of traditional small farmers.
China’s leadership has focused on remaking farming to stop the spread. 

With generous subsidies, Beijing has ordered governments and businesses to build industrial-scale farms with safeguards like quarantine areas for new arrivals and incinerators for diseased pigs.
That solution could help long-term, but China’s immediate response has made the spread worse.
When the swine fever began to spread 16 months ago, the Ministry of Agriculture told the country’s local governments to cull all pigs in herds if there was even one sick animal, and to compensate the farmers. 

The ministry authorized local governments to pay up to $115 for the largest pigs, a cap later raised to $170. 

Before the epidemic, however, many pigs sold for $250 or more apiece, particularly breeding sows, according to government data. 

With the epidemic, the price has soared to $600 or more.
To get that partial reimbursement, many farmers had to deal with tightfisted local officials. 

The ministry said it would reimburse local governments only for between 40 percent and 80 percent of their costs. 

Local governments also had to provide proof, often including laboratory tests, that pigs died of Chinese swine fever and not some other ailment.

Su Dezhi, a 34-year-old butcher in Guo Village, said that he had gone from selling two pigs a day worth of pork to half a pig.

As a result, culling has been slow. 

Official data show only 1.2 million pigs, or less than 0.3 percent of the country’s herds, have been culled. 

It is not clear where the rest of the country’s vanished herds went, but food experts say many were likely butchered and turned into food. 

That would worsen the spread, because the disease can lurk in meat for months.
Australia has found that almost half of the sausages and other pork products carried by recently arriving Chinese passengers or the mail were contaminated, said Mark Schipp, the president of the 182-nation World Organization for Animal Health in Paris and Australia’s chief veterinarian.
In Wulongqiao, a quiet village in the low, pine-studded hills of northern Hunan Province, a number of farmers said they did not bother with seeking compensation, citing the low payout.
Where many pigs went is a mystery. 

Mr. Peng, the farmer, said that when he slaughtered his pigs, he had panicked and buried them in secrecy, and so had no record of what became of them. 

He filed for the loss under his commercial insurance, which covered only a tenth of the value of the pigs, he said.
Chinese officials have tried to be reassuring. 

In April, July and October, officials said they had brought the disease under control, only to see signs of further spread. 

Each new statement was provided by a less senior official than the one before. 

Most recently, the agriculture ministry said that it only hoped production at the end of next year would be four-fifths of normal levels — still a shortfall equal to the entire pork production of the United States, the world’s second-largest pork-producing nation.
For now, dying pigs and rising pork prices are changing diets and cooking practices across China.
Su Dezhi, a pork butcher at an open-air market about 20 miles from Mr. Chen’s farm, said that he used to buy and carve up two pigs a day for sale. 

Now he can only sell half a pig a day. 

The wholesale price per pound for him to buy pigs has more than tripled.
“I can barely cover my costs,” he said, a large cleaver in his hand as he stood behind a table with only a few bloody slabs of pork.

Chen Zhixiang, 36, is among the very few pig farmers in Wulongqiao who have not lost any pigs.

Yet many in China seem reluctant to eat anything else. 

Across an aisle from Mr. Su stood several large cages full of chickens and ducks. 

But the poultry vendor, She Xinbao, said that his sales had only increased from about 30 birds a day to 33 or 34, partly because poultry prices have also risen.
Those who have pigs have enjoyed the surging prices. 

Chen Zhixiang, a 36-year-old pig farmer with a black dragon tattoo on his right forearm, is among the very few pig farmers in Wulongqiao who have not lost any pigs. 

He said he had cooked meals for his pigs from raw corn this year rather than buy feed that might be contaminated.
Pigs have become so rare in his part of Hunan Province that when he drives to a village these days to sell an animal or two, he draws a crowd.
“People gathered around the truck to stare at them,” he said. 

“It’s like they were seeing a panda.”

Whistle-Blowing AIDS Doctor Reflects on Roots of Epidemic in China

By LUO SILING

Dr. Gao Yaojie, who helped expose H.I.V.-tainted blood sales in Henan Province, in her apartment in New York last month.

In October, the pioneering Chinese AIDS fighter Gao Yaojie disclosed her wish to be cremated after death: “Please scatter my ashes in the Yellow River.”
But Dr. Gao, 88, a retired gynecologist who uncovered a major H.I.V. outbreak in central China in the late 1990s, also had a more pointed message: “I do not want what I have achieved in this life to become a tool for others to gain fame and profit.”
What she has achieved is considerable.
In 1996, she was called in to examine a female patient with mysterious symptoms at a hospital in Zhengzhou, Henan Province.
The woman had become infected with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, through a blood transfusion obtained from a blood bank.
Dr. Gao started her investigations and discovered an unsanitary blood collection and sales network, abetted by local officials, that had spread tainted blood throughout the region.
Many residents were selling their blood, which was pooled with blood from other donors.
After plasma was extracted, the rest of the pooled blood, now often carrying H.I.V. or other infections, was reinjected into donors, so they could give more frequently.
Dr. Gao’s work to expose the epidemic and help its victims won her international acclaim but harassment at home.
Her movements were increasingly restricted, her phone was tapped, and she was stalked when she ventured outdoors.
In 2009, she decided to leave China.
“It was because I want to tell the truth to the world,” she wrote in her memoir.
In 2010, she was appointed a visiting scholar at Columbia University in New York, and she continues to live nearby. (Her husband, also a physician, died in 2006.)
She has written several books on AIDS as well as a collection of poetry.
In an interview before World AIDS Day on Thursday, Dr. Gao talked about her life in the United States and what she considers the still-untold truth about the AIDS epidemic in China.

Why did you release the statement about your wishes after death?
In 2005, as my husband was struggling with throat cancer, we thought about water burial.
Being buried in the ground was out of the question, because in Henan, the lease on a grave is only good for 20 years.
Afterward, you have to pay more to keep it.
I would like my son to carry out the water burial for me.
When he was 11, he was jailed for three years for being connected to me. [During the Cultural Revolution, Dr. Gao was denounced as being from a “landlord” family.]
After he was rehabilitated, he went on to university and became a professor.
Now that I’ve gone abroad, he’s become worried that the Gao clan might charge him with filial impiety if he “threw his mother into the water.”
So I wrote this statement.
After I die, my son will take my ashes and scatter them in the Yellow River.
Actually, that isn’t the chief problem.
It’s the fact that some people have used my name for their own advantage.
Some have used my name to raise money without my knowledge.

In 2009, you came to the United States and said you would tell the world the truth behind the AIDS epidemic in China. What is that truth?

People campaigning for AIDS awareness at a section of the Great Wall, in Tianjin, in September.

The root of AIDS in China was the plasma market, which was introduced not only in Henan but in other provinces as well.
Henan was severely affected, however.
From the late 1980s to early 1990s, the plasma market took off in several parts of Henan.
Then Liu Quanxi became director of the Henan Health Department and strongly pushed the policy, which encouraged farmers to sell their blood.
From 1992 to 1998, as a result of the administration of [the provincial party secretary] Li Changchun, blood-selling became an established “industry.”
In a few years, blood stations had spread everywhere in Henan.
Only about 230 of them were licensed.
There were countless illegal ones.
The places with the most blood stations then are the places with the most severe AIDS problem now. From 1998 to 2004, under [now Premier] Li Keqiang, who succeeded Li Changchun in Henan, the AIDS incubation period, which is five to eight years, passed, and a great number of people infected with H.I.V. began showing AIDS symptoms and died.
AIDS not only killed individuals but destroyed countless families.
This was a man-made catastrophe. 
Yet the people responsible for it have never been brought to account, nor have they uttered a single word of apology.
I am very angry now.
Why?
In 2004, the government, which had begun to acknowledge the existence of the AIDS epidemic, sent medical teams to 38 “AIDS villages” in Henan.
Yet there were so many other people in Henan who did not get the needed treatment, not to mention those in other provinces.
In 2004, the Chinese government began to register AIDS patients and put out this policy: Those with symptoms would get 200 renminbi each month.
Those who didn’t yet show symptoms would get 150 renminbi.
This came with a condition, however, which was that one must write “sexual transmission” under “cause of infection,” because the authorities had ordered that “blood transmission” not appear in the questionnaire.
They hid the truth from the public. 
They wouldn’t let the victims say it was blood transmission, only homosexual activity or drug use or prostitution.
Since the officials suppressed information about the epidemic while cracking down on anyone who tried to report the facts or go to Beijing to file petitions, the epidemic wasn’t contained in time but kept getting worse.
On Dec. 18, 2003, Vice Premier Wu Yi met with me and we spent three hours discussing the problem.
She said, “Someone told me that the main routes of AIDS infection in China are drug use and sex.”
I said, “That’s a lie. If you don’t believe me I can call a rickshaw and pull you there myself so you can see what’s happening.”
She finally believed me, but soon the toadies were around her again and telling her homosexuality and sex were the main causes.

Have official attitudes changed under Xi Jinping?
It must be said that the government indirectly admits the existence of the plasma disaster.
I have two pieces of evidence: One is Xi Jinping’s wife, Peng Liyuan.
In September 2015, in her speech at the United Nations, Peng mentioned a 5-year-old orphan named Gao Jun.
He is now 15 and is from Anhui Province.
His parents were infected with H.I.V. from selling blood.
He was the first person affected by the epidemic Peng had come into contact with after she became the [Health Ministry’s] ambassador for H.I.V./AIDS prevention [in 2006].
The other evidence is from December 2015, when the AIDS orphans project of Du Cong’s Chi Heng Foundation was awarded the China Charity Award by the Ministry of Civil Affairs.
Du Cong, who had came to China’s rural areas in 2002 for a work project, started to help orphans after seeing the situation in the AIDS villages.
So far, the foundation has raised about 200 million renminbi [$29 million] and helped more than 20,000 people, including more than 600 orphans.
On the other hand, the Central Committee’s Leading Group for Inspection Work sent a team to Henan in 2014 for a two-month investigation.
The first day that they stayed at the Yellow River Hotel in Zhengzhou, more than 300 plasma market victims gathered in front of the hotel to submit their complaints.
But they were warded off by officials and the police.

Is the blood disaster under control now?
In 1995, Henan Province began closing some blood-collecting stations.
However, illegal blood stations are still active.
Last year, I read four news reports about illegal blood stations, three in Beijing, one in Nanjing.
Of course, there must be some illegal blood stations that have not been detected.
And I think the spread of H.I.V. is not totally under control.
Last year, I read a report about a woman who was infected with H.I.V. through a blood transfusion during surgery in Tongxu County, in Henan, which indicates there are still problems with blood donors.
Unfortunately, the victims are farmers, and most of them are illiterate.
They don’t know what happened to them.
They don’t know how to speak up for themselves.
They think this happened because of an unavoidable fate.
In recent years, they have begun petitioning for their rights, but their situation is still very bad.

How is your life in America?
Because I can’t speak English, I don’t go out that often.
Every month I pay $2,000 for my apartment.
The money comes from funds Professor Andrew Nathan [of Columbia University] raised for me.
Since I didn’t work in the United States in my younger days or pay taxes, I feel rather uncomfortable asking the government for assistance.
But in fact I am being taken care of by the United States.
Every month I get $87 worth of food stamps.
All my renumerations and award money goes to buying copies of my books and donating them.
For some time, I’ve had high blood pressure and blood clots in my left leg.
In the past three years, I’ve hardly been able to walk.
A caretaker is with me 24 hours a day.
My life in the United States is busy.
I receive at least six letters a day.
And I have many visitors.