Henan AIDs crisis

China's Henan province is "the ground zero of arguably the world's worst HIV/Aids epidemic," according to The Guardian, with up to a million people infected. In the village of Xiongqiao it's likely that every adult has the disease. The shocking culprit, in general terms, is "China's peculiar blend of profit-at-all-costs capitalism and hide-and-control communism." Specifically, the problem is the province's largely unregulated trade of human blood:

The system had been adapted so that villagers could give such huge amounts of blood without suffering anaemia. After extracting plasma from each 800cc donation, the collectors would pump 400cc back into the arms of the donors. It is believed that people's blood often got mixed up in this way, spreading HIV to almost everyone involved.

As in China's response to SARS, the goverment refused to accept the magnitude of the AIDs problem until 2002, when its AIDs statistics were amended from 30,000 to a million in the course of a single day. Western media sources estimate that China will have 10 million AIDs-infected citizens by 2010.