Abstract
In the central farmland of the early 1990s, China saw the average farmer working long hours, rising before dawn and often not returning home until after sunset. Fields were ploughed, planted and irrigated by hand. Compensation for these long days of labour was minimal: the average rural farming household earned between US&8 and US&12 a month, a meagre living eked out from an average of 0.05 ha of land per person, about the size of two tennis courts. Faced with pressures to feed and educate one’s family and to ensure the successful marriage of one’s children (often an expensive proposition), the farm labourer was in a position of particular financial vulnerability. It was through this fragile population that the commercial plasma donation industry ploughed a disease-ridden trench leading to the infection of thousands with HIV.
Selling plasma to blood product companies infects a large number of donors on one single occasion, if only one is infected (From “HIV/AIDS: China’s Titanic Peril” [1])
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© 2017 People's Medical Publishing House Co. Ltd. and Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2017
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Chaddah, A., Wu, Z. (2017). Selling Blood Spreads HIV. In: Wu, Z. (eds) HIV/AIDS in China. Public Health in China, vol 1. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-3746-7_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-3746-7_2
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