Chinese researchers in southern China claim that they have produced the world’s first genetically-modified children — a pair of twin girls with resistance to infection by the HIV or AIDS virus. Apart from the ethical issues inherent to the experiment, as well as doubts about the supposed results, the development emphasizes the seriousness of China’s AIDS crisis.
Chinese researchers in southern China claim that they have produced the world’s first genetically modified children—a pair of twin girls with resistance to infection by the HIV virus. Apart from the ethical issues inherent to the experiment, as well as doubts about the supposed results, the development emphasizes the seriousness of China’s AIDS crisis.
He Jiankui is a researcher at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province. On Nov. 26, the day before an international genetic engineering conference in Hong Kong,
He said the twin girls were born this month with modified genes, and will be AIDS-free for life.
Prior to making his claim, however, He hadn’t published any articles about his experiments or provided any proof for what he claims to have accomplished. Meanwhile, international medical scholars criticized He for attempting such a risky and unethical experiment.
Dec. 1 is World AIDS Day. The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CCDC) announced on Nov. 23 that by the end of 2018, there will be 1.25 million AIDS patients in China. Additionally, that figure
could be bigger by about a third, owing to the estimated number of people who do not know that they have been infected.
At the fifth China AIDS Academic Conference held in Kunming of western China’s Yunnan Province from Sept. 26 to Sept. 29, AIDS experts
announced that there were over 40,000 newly infected patients in the second quarter of this year, and that 93.1 percent of them had contracted the disease due to sexual activity.
This came as a shock, since previously, the primary vector of HIV and AIDS transmission was transfusions from unsanitary blood donations, which are popular among rural Chinese as a means of supplementing their meager incomes.
Gao Yaojie, an AIDS activist who won the Jonathan Mann Award for Health and Human Rights, said in 2014 that
there were at least 10 million AIDS patients in China, which is 10 times the official data, and that most of them had been infected in the process of giving or receiving blood.
But on Nov. 23, Wang Bin, vice director of CCDC, said
the main means of AIDS infection in China today is via sexual contact, at 95.4 percent of total cases, slightly higher than other estimates. Around 70 percent of current AIDS cases were contracted via heterosexual relationships, and 25.5 by homosexual activity.
The CCDC stated the increase of AIDS cases among students is particularly dramatic. While it didn’t produce statistics to back up its claims, it listed international students from African countries as a primary cause for the increase. According to China’s Ministry of Education, 50,000 international students come to China from Africa annually, making more than 10 percent of all international students in the country.
The state-run China Daily reported that many HIV-positive African students
have entered China since 2010, when the authorities relaxed disease controls at immigration customs. The China Daily report stated that the international students tend to lead promiscuous lifestyles with local women, helping spread AIDS more quickly.
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