A boy aged just eight has been banished from a Chinese village - because he was found to be HIV-positive.
The youngster's own
grandfather was among 200 people in the community, in China's
southwestern Sichuan province, who signed a petition to expel the child
to 'protect villagers' health'.
It has been reported that the boy - who was given the pseudonym Kunkun by Chinese media - contracted the virus from his mother.
The case, reported in
the Global Times newspaper, has highlighted the stigma attached to the
disease in China, where many sufferers face widespread discrimination.
Previous reports said the boy was refused admission to local schools and villagers would avoid contact with him.
'Nobody plays (with me), I play alone,' Kunkun said, according to a report on the website of the People's Daily newspaper.
The website also said Kunkun was referred to as a 'time bomb' in the petition.
'The villagers
sympathise with him, he is innocent, and only a small child. But his
AIDS is too scary for us,' Wang Yishu, party chief of Shufangya village,
told the website.
The boy's mother reportedly left the family in 2006, while his father 'lost contact' after Kunkun's condition was diagnosed.
Kunkun sneaked into a
specially-convened meeting held earlier this month by villagers to
discuss how they would banish him, it has been claimed.
High ranking officials
from the township government said 'legally speaking' the boy could not
be expelled, and that he has the same rights as other villagers, the
Global News said.
Officials plan to visit
the village and speak with the villagers', it added, while the People's
Daily website said 'ideological work' would be carried out in the
village. It was unclear last night whether Kunkun was still in his
village.
The case has sparked debate on China's Twitter-like Sina Weibo, where it was the most widely-discussed topic early on Thursday.
'Why was he ruthlessly neglected, it is so unfair to him,' said a post by one user.
'This is because the Chinese population cannot get enough education, causing ignorance and panic,' said another.
Figures released earlier
this month by China's National Health and Family Planning Commission
showed that a total of 497,000 people in China have been diagnosed with
HIV/AIDS since the country's first case in 1985. China has a population
of 1.36billion.
Discrimination against
those with the virus remains an issue at schools, hospitals, workplaces
and other establishments across the country, a factor that experts say
hampers efforts to diagnose and treat it.
Knowledge of HIV/AIDS is worse in poor, rural areas, such as the community Kunkun is from, experts say.Attempts by authorities
to educate these populations about discrimination often fail, a
campaigner who would only give his surname as Tang told AFP.
'The publicity campaign
is not strong enough to reach the rural areas and villages and that's
why there is more discrimination there,' said Tang, a community
coordinator at the Kunming office of AIDS advocacy group Aizhixing.
'Personally I don't
think such situations would exist in cities,' Tang added. 'People in
rural areas know little about civil rights and they have a poor sense of
the disease.
'We will continue using our network to speak out, meanwhile we hope the government could do more as well.'
The Nanjing-based
anti-discrimination NGO Justice for All wrote a letter to party chiefs
in Sichuan calling on them to punish school chiefs and local officials
for their 'Cultural Revolution style', a reference to the Mao
Zedong-inspired public denunciations of 'foes'.
'We cannot imagine how
Kunkun will grow up and look back on the experience of childhood,' said a
draft of the letter, which was emailed to AFP on Thursday.
source: dailymail
