By Mike Frick

The website Seeing Red in China recently published a translation of Dr. Wang Shuping’s first-person account of how she discovered China’s HIV tainted blood disaster while working as a physician in Henan Province in the early 1990s. A hepatologist by training, Dr. Wang first observed widespread hepatitis C contamination in samples collected from plasma donors. Knowing hepatitis C and HIV could both be transmitted through blood, Dr. Wang used her own savings to establish a center that began testing blood donors for HIV. Among the first 409 samples she tested in 1995, she found that 13% tested positive for HIV. These findings earned her rebuke and harassment from local officials, who shut down her clinical testing center and tried to suppress her findings.

Dr. Wang’s story provides a personal account of the early years of the Chinese HIV epidemic when physicians began to discover the frightening extent of central China’s contaminated blood supply. Subsequent efforts to secure compensation for the tens of thousands of people affected by the disaster have been unsuccessful, as a January 2012 joint report by Asia Catalyst and the Korekata AIDS Law Center showed.

In 2001, Dr. Wang left China for the United States, where she worked as a hepatitis C researcher for many years. She
is currently studying for a degree in public health.

Read the English version of her account on Seeing Red in China and the original Chinese on the overseas advocacy website Can Yu.