Chinese NGOs and public health professionals have lashed out at a draft ordinance prohibiting people with HIV from entering public bathhouses, underscoring a rift between the country's government and emerging civil society. The draft legislation, posted on the ministry of commerce's website on Saturday, stipulates that bathhouses, spas, and foot massage parlours must display signs barring "people with sexually transmitted diseases, Aids and infectious skin diseases" from entering.
The virus can be transmitted through unprotected sex, from mother to child during pregnancy and labour, and through "use of contaminated injection equipment". Sharing a bath with an HIV-positive person "poses absolutely no risk from a public health perspective, and that's important to realise".
The ministry will "gather public opinion" on the ordinance until 11 November, when it will be sent to a higher government body for final approval. Based on the most recent figures in , UNAids and the Chinese government estimated more than , people in the country were living with HIV, including those who had developed Aids. Most face a deep-rooted social stigma. Two pieces of high-level Chinese legislation, introduced in and respectively, expressly prohibit discrimination against people with HIV.
But experts say there's a gap between legislation and implementation, due in part to a lack of co-ordination among government agencies. Shen said that despite government efforts to bolster HIV and Aids education, many of the country's institutions — even its hospitals — have a poor understanding of the virus.
People with HIV are completely barred from civil service jobs; they're frequently refused medical treatment at hospitals. Children who are HIV-positive are often turned away by schools. The ministry drafted the ordinance in an apparent effort to clean up the country's notoriously under-regulated bathhouse industry. Bathhouses are far more common in China than the west; they're usually more elaborate too, allowing customers to bathe, receive massages, eat from a buffet, surf the internet, and fall asleep while watching television in plush armchairs.
