For the first time in more than two decades, China has lifted the ban on AIDS victims entering its borders. Known as the Border Quarantine Law, the 20-year regulation banned people who were HIV-positive to enter the country.
Other countries across the world also have long histories of banning AIDS victims to enter its borders – the United States just lifted its 22-year ban in January.
According to Chinese officials, the ban was lifted for two reasons: First, because the ban itself does nothing to cure or help existing AIDS already present in rural China and has a very limited affect on actually controlling the disease, and secondly, because with a greater knowledge of AIDS, people now know how to prevent and protect themselves from infection.
A great number of China’s rural people have struggled with AIDS due massive blood drives in the 1990s, when many poverty-stricken farmers in the Henan province signed up in droves to sell their blood to agencies who promised to give blood plasma to biomedical companies. Some agencies were legal and some were not, but farmers sold their blood to supplement their meager agricultural income, and many became infected in the process or dealing with unmonitored or unsanitary conditions.
The rule was apparently a great inconvenience to China during many large international events, such as the 2008 Beijing Olympics, for which it imposed a temporary waiver.
Timing is intrinsic to China’s removal of the law, since it expects 70 million visitors to attend the Shanghai World Expo, and 4 million of those travelers to be from other countries. The move also lifts the ban on travelers with leprosy and sexually transmitted diseases.
