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Hepatitis B cause for discrimination in China
April 12th, 2004
By Ching-Ching Ni
Los Angeles Times
JIAXING, China - Until a few months ago, Zhou Yichao’s goal, to get a good job and support his widowed mother, seemed well within reach.
He had just taken the public-servant exam and scored among the very top. His face-to-face interview could only help his prospects, as the 22-year-old knew his potential employers would be impressed with his tall athletic build and good manners.
Then his application was rejected on the basis that he tested positive for hepatitis B, a liver disease he never knew he had. With few exceptions, Chinese government agencies legally may weed out candidates based on the health of their liver.
Zhou bought a fruit-carving knife, found the two officials who rejected his application and stabbed one to death and seriously wounded the other.
Today Zhou sits on death row.
But instead of outrage against an intentional murderer, Zhou’s name has become the rallying call of a national movement against discriminatory hiring practices and the lack of legal redress.
“The outcome of this case could affect the entire future of people with hepatitis in China,” said Bi Xuejun, Zhou’s attorney. “Unfair discrimination against a whole segment of society could push some people to commit extreme antisocial acts. This is a serious social problem. Zhou has basically sacrificed his own life to bring attention to this issue.”
More than 120 million people, about 10 percent of the Chinese population, are chronic carriers of the disease, many of whom like Zhou do not show any symptoms of infection and should not pose a threat to their co-workers.
Hepatitis B is spread through the exchange of bodily fluids, such as contaminated blood, unprotected sex, shared needles and between infected mothers and their newborns. It is not contagious through casual contact such as shaking hands.
Full-blown hepatitis B causes liver failure and death. Nearly a million people worldwide die from the disease every year, about one-third of them Chinese.
Like HIV/AIDS, there is no cure for the illness. Unlike AIDS, however, hepatitis B is preventable with a simple vaccine. While the Chinese government is stepping up efforts to immunize newborns and gradually reduce the overall infected population, inoculating the entire population has proved far tougher, advocates say, than tolerating widespread discrimination.
“Chinese know a lot more about AIDS because at least there are campaigns that teach people about how it is spread,” said Zhang Xianzhu, another graduate rejected by a state employer after his hepatitis B test. “But there are no campaigns to educate them about hepatitis, how it’s caught and spread. And because it is not as deadly as AIDS it has totally been neglected.”
Under the old cradle-to-grave socialist system, individuals were assigned job units and few employers bothered to check the medical health of someone they couldn’t fire anyway.
In China’s new capitalist-style economy, only the very best, or physically fit, are chosen for jobs in a nations where between 100 million and 200 million are out of work and 2 million new college graduates join the job market each year.
Height, marriage and health status can be considered by employers in China. Under the circumstances, a positive hepatitis test can mean no job.
To cope, some cheat, hiring healthy people to take the required physical, or hop from job to job to avoid detection. The lucky ones go overseas, where privacy laws forbid employers to ask such questions. Many more go back where they came from, usually rural areas where they try to forget they ever earned a college diploma. Some resign themselves to a life of farming or other manual labor.
But social discrimination and medical ignorance also go beyond the job market.
A new Web site for hepatitis carriers is filled with horror stories. According to one mother who is herself a carrier and had passed it to her child, her local kindergartens refused to accept anyone who tests positive for the virus. After several rejections at various local schools, she had no choice but send her 3-year-old to live with her grandmother in the countryside.
Afraid to betray their health status, some carriers never date or marry. Others keep it from their spouse.
Zhang filed the country’s first discrimination lawsuit against the government.
“I wanted to do something for this community,” Zhang said. “I know it is not easy for the people to sue the government and many people are afraid to do it. But I did it because there are so many people like me locked out of jobs and rotting in their little dark corners of the world. We face a crisis of survival.”
Posted by: Los Angeles Times at April 9, 2004 09:00 PM
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Unfortunately, Zhang only won this lawsuit by name. The local court did nothing about his employment request. The judge also avoided to comment whether blood test aimed to kick out all hbver in any feild is right or wrong; or whether it’s a form of discrimination.
All large companies in mainland still require the applicants to undergo a blood test to see if he or she is HBV positive. carriers of HBV have no chance to be accepted into any companies. The only way to pass is to cheat. What a pity.
want to know what’s insane? a government’s police that’s indirectly killing millions of lives.
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