Mike Chinoy: AIDS activist missing in China

CNN's Mike Chinoy

(CNN) -- Reports coming out of China say that up to 500,000 peasants in the poverty-stricken province of Henan are believed to be infected with the HIV virus -- or are already dying from AIDS -- after they gave blood in a government-sponsored blood-for-money program. Unsanitary practices spread tainted blood for years in the 1990s, and now, whole families and villages are dying from AIDS, whose symptoms take several years to appear.

An activist who was working to find help for these forgotten villagers and publicize their plight has disappeared in China. CNN Correspondent Mike Chinoy is in Hong Kong and talked to CNN Anchor Carol Costello about the story

COSTELLO: Let's head overseas now. One of China's leading AIDS activists has mysteriously disappeared. Is it a case of the government trying to silence his pleas to help the sick and the dying?

CHINOY: This is a very, very interesting case. Wan Yanhai is widely seen as the most vocal AIDS activist in China and he's been missing for the past several days. His friends and relatives believe he's been picked up by the Beijing police.

His detention, if that is, indeed, what it is, underscores the fact that China could be the site of the next great explosion in the worldwide AIDS epidemic.

Wan figured prominently in efforts to expose an astonishing situation in the central province of Henan. There, during the past 10 or 12 years, local authorities encouraged the villagers to sell their blood. The authorities were marketing the plasma in pharmaceutical products well beyond that province. But the whole way that the procedure was done was extremely unsanitary and the upshot is that it's believed between 100,000 and 500,000, maybe even more than that, peasants in this rural province of China now have the HIV virus.

The local authorities have tried to cover up this whole episode and Wan Yanhai was one of the people who has pushed very hard to try to bring it to light. And his apparent detention now suggests that the Chinese authorities are unhappy about people speaking out, both about this episode and more broadly trying to generate public discussion about the many very complicated and controversial issues involving AIDS in China..

COSTELLO: Just two incredible things you just said. Hundreds of thousands of people might be infected with the HIV virus? Hundreds of thousands?

CHINOY: That's right. In one Chinese province alone. And these people are typical Chinese peasants. Many of them have no idea what AIDS is. They were simply selling their blood, thinking that it was a way to earn a little extra cash. Now, reports from travelers who have been to that area -- and most journalists are not allowed to go -- but the information we have talks about whole villages where you see many emaciated and sick people wandering around. They're getting almost no medical care. The authorities in the area don't want to acknowledge what has happened and don't want to provide for these people.

And that may be just the tip of an iceberg in a China that is rapidly changing, where you have an explosion of commercial sex, but where discussion of sexual matters is still largely taboo, particularly when it comes to the gay community.

So all of this together creates the possibility for a huge explosion in AIDS. Chinese officials themselves say that if nothing is done, there could be 10 million AIDS sufferers in China by the year 2010.

COSTELLO: So they supposedly arrest this AIDS activist. Will we ever know for sure where he is?

CHINOY: Eventually it's likely ... some news will come out. There's some question about precisely what he may be charged with. If, for example, he got documents from Henan Province that illustrate the scale of this thing he might be charged with leaking state secrets. His group, his advocacy group has been facing some official harassment for some time. It was kicked out of its office in the university district of Beijing earlier this summer.

He's a man who lives part-time in California and part-time in China and has adopted some of the more aggressive tactics that he's learned from AIDS activists in the States, confronting Chinese officials at international meetings on AIDS and so on. And so he's generated a lot of enemies in high places in the Chinese bureaucracy.

We'll have to wait and see what the final word is on his fate.