China Irks Foreigners in Its Universities by Asking Them to Take Tests for AIDS

China, whose population of 1 billion has so far been exposed to only a single known case of AIDS, has aroused the ire of foreign students and teachers here by urging that they submit to blood tests for the disease.

A special AIDS risk prevention bureau within China’s Ministry of Public Health sent out a letter early this month to universities in four of the nation’s leading cities, instructing authorities to set up AIDS blood-screening programs for foreigners on their campuses.

So far as is known, China is the first nation in the world to ask foreigners to have blood tests for acquired immune deficiency syndrome. There are about 10,000 foreign students either enrolled at Chinese universities or taking language courses here, plus a few thousand foreign teachers and experts on Chinese campuses.

The new directive came to light this week, when officials at Jiaotong University, in the central Chinese city of Xian, began handing out notices telling foreigners that health officials would come to their dormitory within three days to take blood samples for AIDS.

The notice was handed out to all residents of the special guest house set aside for foreigners, without regard to their sexual preference, marital status or age. The recipients included a 70-year-old Canadian woman and her 68-year-old husband.

“We’re in a low-risk category, I think,” the woman, Helen Tonn, who came to China to teach English last summer from a small town near Winnipeg, told The Times. Tonn said she sympathizes with China’s desire to keep AIDS out of the country but has decided not to submit to the tests.

Other foreign teachers and students also said they will refuse to give blood for the AIDS tests--both because of the concerns about privacy that have been expressed when such screening programs have been proposed in the West and also because of fear that the Chinese AIDS testing program might itself be harmful to health.

“I don’t think they have a right to ask me to take that test,” said Ellen Hewitt, 32, of Massachusetts, who is teaching English and American culture in Xian. “I don’t know the sanitary conditions. I could get hepatitis from the tests. And I don’t know how the tests will be used.”

The letters in Xian suggested to the foreign teachers that the blood tests were compulsory.

“The epidemic prevention station of Shaanxi province kindly asks you to have an AIDS test blood test sample taken on Thursday, Dec. 18, 1986, at the foreign guest house of Xian’s Jiaotong University,” said the notice. “This is a new test given to all foreigners in China.”

However, after some of the teachers complained to their embassies and to foreign correspondents, a spokesman for China’s AIDS prevention bureau in Peking told The Times that the tests at the universities are not mandatory. He also said that the screening program is not yet being applied to all foreigners in China, but only to those living at Chinese universities.

Persuade, Not Compel

“They (foreign students and teachers) are not compelled to take the tests, but we seek to persuade them to do so,” said Qi Xiaochou, vice director of the new AIDS unit. He said there have been some “problems” in Xian and that authorities there might not be implementing the program properly.

It is not unusual in China for officials of the central government to maintain that their directives have been carried too far by overzealous local officials. China also says, for example, that it carries out its family planning limits through persuasion rather than compulsion and that improper local enforcement, rather than official Chinese government policy, has resulted in some cases of women being required to have abortions.

Qi, the spokesman for the Ministry of Health’s AIDS unit, said the directive requiring that AIDS screening programs be set up has been sent to universities in Peking, Shanghai, Xian and Canton. Asked about foreigners’ fears of catching hepatitis from the testing program, he called the risk minimal and said that so far, blood tests are the only way to test for AIDS.

Lisa Wei Chang, a program officer for the U.N. World Health Organization in China, said Wednesday that her organization has not endorsed blood-screening programs as a means of combatting AIDS.

“The number of positive tests would be so low that it wouldn’t be cost-effective,” she said. Instead, the World Health Organization has recommended that countries set up a surveillance system, laboratory support and education and prevention programs for AIDS.

In China, AIDS is known as ai si bing, or the “love-death sickness.”

So far, China is the only large nation to remain apparently free of AIDS. Four Chinese hemophiliacs near Shanghai were recently found to be carriers of the virus, which they received from imported blood products, but none has contracted the disease.

The single documented AIDS case on Chinese soil was an Argentine tourist, Oscar Messina, who died in a Peking hospital six days after coming here last year. According to Western diplomats, Chinese officials were furious about Messina, who apparently knew he was dying of AIDS and joined a San Francisco-based tour group in order to see China before he died.

A year ago, Chinese health officials held several public burnings of second-hand clothing imported from abroad. Since then, authorities here have banned the import of virtually all blood products, ordered tour guides to watch out for symptoms of AIDS and formed the new AIDS unit within the Health Ministry.

“With our open-door policy, the growing number of foreigners visiting China--particularly from the United States, where this illness has developed rapidly--poses a great danger for our people,” said Dr. Cao Qing, a spokesman for the AIDS bureau, in October.

U.S. officials estimate that there are about 1,000 to 2,000 American students, researchers and teachers on Chinese university campuses. Of the foreign students at Chinese universities, about one-quarter to one-third come from Africa, where several countries have reported that AIDS has reached epidemic proportions.

Among the Americans in Xian refusing to give a blood sample was Bill Holm, 43, of Minnesota, another English teacher.

“Many people have told them that the tests are an invasion of their privacy,” Holm said. “I wouldn’t take the test in America, and I won’t take it here.”