NYC just hosted it’s annual AIDS walk and half way across the world people are being denied treatment. Proof that those tackling the disease have come a long way while some still have a ways to go.  Find out why after the jump.
www.reuters.com reports:
The world’s most populous nation — with 1.34 billion people — had 740,000 people infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, with 105,000 AIDS patients, in 2009, according to state news agency Xinhua, citing United Nations estimates.
HIV/AIDS became a major problem for China in the 1990s when hundreds of thousands of impoverished farmers in rural Henan province became infected through botched blood-selling schemes, but the virus is now primarily spread in the country via sexual contact.
Based on interviews with 103 people living with HIV and 23 healthcare workers, the ILO and China’s National Center for STD and AIDS Prevention and Control found that people have been refused medical care and have been discriminated against by healthcare workers.
One HIV-positive man, talking at a news conference to unveil the report, recounted how he was denied medical treatment for his back problem because of his HIV status in hospitals in Tianjin and Beijing.
“The doctor said at our hospital, many patients need surgery, and if other patients get infected, it will be a very bad thing,” said the man, who declined to be identified.
“At the second hospital … the doctor told me: ‘I sympathize with your suffering but because of your status, I dare not operate on you’,” said the man, who is a farmer from Tianjin and added he was forced to leave his job in a steel firm after his boss discovered he had HIV.
