A 64-year-old man says his wife scolded him and used him as a punching bag after he was diagnosed with HIV about three months ago. He's now been in a Shanghai hospital for two months and doesn't want to go home.
'I don't want to because the medical staff are kind to us patients and never show discrimination,' said the man who declined to reveal his full name. 'I think staying in the hospital is the hope held by all of us.'
His wife and daughter sent him to the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Centre in June but have never visited him there.
Aids, something Feng knew little about before, has been spreading more rapidly through the ranks of the mainland's elderly in the past few years, with experts saying that the main route of transmission is sex.
The percentage of those over 50 contracting HIV shot up from 7.8 per cent in 2006 to 14.9 per cent in 2009, according to an Aids prevention team from the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). More than 60 per cent of new elderly HIV carriers were farmers, and 11 per cent city dwellers.
The team, from the CDC's National Centre for Aids/STD Control and Prevention, published their findings in the May edition of the Chinese Journal of Epidemiology. It showed that nearly 70 per cent of elderly people contracting HIV were infected through heterosexual transmission, up from 38 per cent, while the homosexual infection rate rose from 0.7 per cent to 3 per cent. Three-quarters of heterosexual cases were contracted through extramarital sex.