We’re writing to tell you about the exciting work Asia Catalyst is doing with grassroots health groups in Asia, and to ask you to continue your support.

• Trained the NGO Leadership Cohort, a group of ten health rights groups who get intensive training in nonprofit management and advocacy over the course of one year. This year’s cohort participants included a courageous former teacher living with HIV/AIDS who runs the only group for people with HIV in her hometown, an organization of sex workers doing ground-breaking outreach and organizing in their community, as well as other community leaders from around the country. Three of our cohort participants will become assistant trainers for the 2013 cohort, and will “pay it forward” by training other groups. As the program scales up, it creates a new generation of professional nonprofit leaders.
• Published three new reports on health and human rights China. Our joint report with Korekata AIDS Law Center on China’s HIV blood disaster was the first major human rights report researched and co-written by a domestic Chinese organization. It was endorsed by UNAIDS and the Shenzhen Center for Disease Control, and our recommendations were taken up by a government advisory working group.
• Trained dozens of East and Southeast Asian activists in human rights documentation and advocacy. We trained forty activists from Africa, Asia and the US at a workshop in Washington DC, and gave intensive training to a new coalition of 12 leading Chinese and Thai gender and sexuality activists at a workshop in Thailand.

• Showcased Chinese activists at the International AIDS Conference in Washington, DC. We provided scholarships, training and round-the clock translation as well as hosting workshops, roundtables, and events to ensure that Chinese civil society had a voice at this important meeting.

This blog is a cross posting from Seeing Red in China.  It was written by Dr. Wang Shuping on the occasion of World Aids Day.  It has been translated from the original Chinese by Cao Yaxue.  Asia Catalyst’s China Program Officer, Mike Frick recently wrote about Dr. Wang’s experience on our blog; read that piece here.

I am Wang Shuping, and, as a doctor and epidemics researcher, I was the one who first discovered Hepatitis C virus and HIV contamination in plasma collection stations mushroomed in China in the 1990s. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people became infected as a result. Twenty years have passed since those frightful discoveries, the current state of blood safety in China, to my dismay, still presents an alarming picture of continuing transmission of HIV and HCV through blood. On World AIDS Day today, I would like to call attention to the matter to raise the public’s awareness and warn the policy makers.

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