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).

With our newest system we intend to publish a News Roundup almost every day of the week, with each particular day of the week corresponding to a particular theme. Yesterday, OpkeHessip published an overview of the economic news stories which came to prominence over the past week, today, I present to you health related stories which hit the press between last Tuesday and yesterday. The hope is that by grouping related stories together, our readers can get a larger, more integrated picture of events in Xinjiang and furthermore have a far easier time searching through our archives for particular stories.

• The party secretary of the XUAR Food and Medicine Supervision Bureau was happy to announce on the 5th that over 490 bottles of fake human serum albumin manufactured as medical supplies were ferreted out of albumin shipments by inspection crews. The “unprecedented” bust resulted from comprehensive operations intended to reform and improve the development, manufacture, distribution, and use of medical supplies throughout Xinjiang over 2007. In addition to the fake albumin find, the operations last year also discovered over 170 different varieties of drugs in 9000 packages to be fake. Over 4000 medicine and medical equipment cases were brought to court, 19 fake drug manufacturing rings were broken up, and 13 medical employees were handed over to employees for unscrupulous practices. The writer of this article candidly acknowledge that between the undeveloped pharmaceutical industry in Xinjiang (90% of medicine comes from other provinces) and rising medicine prices, fake medicine practices have become rampant.
• The 3rd of March was National Love Your Ears day, and the Xinjiang People’s Hospital celebrated by hosting a program of free outpatient services and health awareness activities warmly named the “I can hear the splendor of the Olympics” program. Free ear examinations were offered to previous patients with ear related ailments and programs were conducted to encourage better ear health care and to encourage better treatment to individuals with hearing handicaps.
• The XPCC Armed Police Headquarters Hospital will provide up to 20 thousand female Urumqi residents with free physical checkups between March and May as part of their “Through Women’s Wellbeing, A Peaceful Family” program. Women can pick up health history forms and health manuals at their local Family Planning Station and use this paperwork to receive the free checkup. The hospital will also provide discounts for certain medical treatment procedures.
• According to the XUAR Health Department, cases of measles in Xinjiang are showing a clear downward trend. Xinjiang has experienced an epidemic level outbreak of measles since the beginning of the year, with 12553 reported cases and 27 confirmed deaths. As health officials noticed the rising numbers of measle cases, prevention policies were re-hauled and 14.94 million yuan were allocated to epidemic containment measures. Around 870 thousand individuals have received emergency vaccinations and there have been 8236 full recoveries in districts considered epidemic hotspots.