November 22, 2007
Current TV: China's blood sellers
Even as UNAIDS is busy fighting allegations that it had inflated estimates for years in an alarmist effort to raise funds, Beijing has reported that HIV/AIDS cases are up more than 50% so far this year. Angela Sun of Current TV visits a village in Hebei Province (she did not say where exactly) where many of the residents contracted HIV through government-sponsored blood selling schemes. The plight of AIDS villages has been covered by many media outlets now (including ourselves), but this is the first time we've actually seen video footage of what goes on in these AIDS villages ourselves. To be sure, the patients Angela spoke to seem to be pretty well taken care of and there are definitely more out there who are not as lucky. What hasn't changed of course is the desire by local officials to cover up what goes on in there and to restrict the access that journalists have to these villages, though by the same token, one can always argue that Angela wouldn't even have found her way into one of these villages a few years back.

