The New Dominion

So you may have heard through your friendly telecommunications company health announcement text message service that kebabs might give you AIDS. We heard it first at Liuzhou Laowai. The original text message, when translated to English, says:

Don’t eat any street food anytime soon, especially kebabs! There’s a group of AIDS infected guys from Xinjiang who are trying to infect other people all over the country with AIDS by tainting the skewers with their own blood and by adding blood directly to the food. This has been confirmed as true. Some college students have already been infected! No matter what, eat as little street food as possible and keep your distance from strangers. Please pass this on to your loved ones!

Be very afraid.

As completely idiotic as the text message sounds, there’s even more fun to be had in seeing the reactions of the people who received the warning and even the official response by the Urumqi Health Bureau.

According to this article from Xinhua News Service, this text message, which was part of a nationwide “Health Suggestions” service provided by China Mobile, quickly spread through the residents of Xinjiang but was passed on with extra vigor among college students for reasons that are obvious from the content of the message. A student from the Light Industry College observed, “A lot of students are treating this as something they must pass on out of love and concern for their friends and family.”

At Xinjiang Agricultural University, one student while not entirely believing the text message, still has had his concerns raised and has resolved to eat street food as little as possible. A close friend of this student has expressed firm and unsuspecting belief in the content of the message. The message’s warning has spread quickly through internet channels as well, and whether or not one can get AIDS from eating “infected” food has become a hot topic of debate.

In response to the swirling rumors, officials from the Urumqi Health Bureau’s Disease Control Department have issued statements emphasizing that “Kebabs have been disinfected through the process of being cooked at high temperatures, and its impossible to get infected with AIDS through them” (which seems to imply that you can get AIDS by eating uncooked foods, but I’m not a member of the Disease Control Department for various reasons, I suppose). AIDS, according to information published by the department, exists primarily in the blood, semen, and vaginal secretions; in breast milk, feces, and urine the virus is present in negligible quantities. At room temperature, the virus an only survive for a few hours to a few days, and at high temperatures, in dried blood, or in disinfected items the virus is unlikely to survive in quantities capable of causing infections.

This isn’t the first time something like this has happened. The article mentions two previous rumors involving AIDS transmission, one where watermelons were allegedly injected with AIDS infected blood and another where a group of AIDS patients were infecting people by pricking them in crowds with blood covered pins.

The latter rumor is not unlike a similar rumor which spread throughout the United States, analyzed here at Scopes, and so to the credit of the Chinese, there is nothing particular to the area about scary rumors fueled by the haze of threat and suspicion that hovers around this admittedly powerful and intimidating disease. What does make this situation unique, however, is that the rumor was prevalent among college students, who one imagines should know a little better, and more disturbingly, the latent racism in explicitly associating the malicious AIDS boogie men with kebabs (and previously, watermelons).