Battle against AIDS isn't just for one day a year

• Source: Global Times
• [21:53 November 30 2009]
• Comments

By James Chau

Her name was Dandan.

A wife and mother in her 50s, she looked no different to any Beijing woman you see each day.

We met in the summer at a television studio. As I walked in she had a flask of tea in one hand, a good book in the other and a great smile on her face.

We were both there to be interviewed because apart from being a wife and mother, Dandan was a former drug user and living with HIV.

Over the next hour, she shared her story of how she was infected. But it was the stigma and discrimination she struggled through each day that reminds us that AIDS is not just a battle of public health, but a fight for social justice.

Indeed, Dandan was so genuinely scared of being recognized by her friends, neigh-bors or by just a stranger in the street that she asked the cameramen to record her voice, but not to reveal her identity.

People living with HIV are not afraid to show their face. But they have been threatened to such an extent that my own HIV+ friends have lost jobs, lost families and been forced out of their communities.

As I looked at her sitting to one side of the studio, I imagined too how we, as a people, had pushed her off to the side of society.

Last month, Dandan died of an unrelated illness. She will never live to see the day when stigma and discrimination are a part of our past, but there are many "Dandans" who still can.

Today, women are the fastest growing group of new HIV victims and last week a group of them launched the first ever HIV+ network in China.

AIDS is now mainly transmitted through unprotected sex and when I interviewed them this year, singer Peng Liyuan and actor Pu Cunxin, talking as AIDS ambassadors, made the point that HIV often creeps into what should be the most beautiful moments in our lives.