A rural clinic in Henan province, located on the border with Anhui, is suspected of not changing needles and syringes when injecting drugs to patients, leading to an outbreak of hepatitis C in both areas, with 160 people suspected of being infected so far. According to Xinhua, the individual clinic is located in Miao Shallow Village, Maqiao Town, Yongcheng City, Henan Province, and the doctor practicing medicine is not a qualified village doctor and has not been filed with the city health bureau. The public also reported that the clinic’s doctor did not change needles and syringes during the process of giving intravenous medication to patients. The clinic was exposed because of an outbreak of hepatitis C in the town of Danyang, in the neighboring city of Bozhou, Anhui province, in the middle of this month. 56 people tested positive for hepatitis C, 13 of whom were positive for the virus, most of whom were children. The CDC authorities went to the local investigation and found that these hepatitis C infected patients had gone to the adjacent Wu Wenyi clinic in Miao Shallow Village, Maqiao Town, Yongcheng City, Henan Province, on different occasions to receive intravenous treatment. The parents of the sick children said in an interview with the Jianghuai Morning Post that the town of Dancheng in Anhui borders the town of Maqiao in Henan, seven or eight miles apart, so it is easy to get back and forth. And there is a slightly older doctor at the Miao Shallow Health Center who sees patients very well: “Whether the child has a cold or a fever, if he or she comes to this health center for a shot, he or she will soon be well.” Parents suspect that the children’s infections may have something to do with this doctor’s habits. This doctor still uses old-fashioned stainless steel syringes, not disposable syringes. The needles are put in boiling water to sterilize them and then reused. “I asked him to change the needles to give my child a shot, and it didn’t matter if he added some money.” One parent said a younger doctor at the health center would follow that advice, but the slightly older one never did. Henan Yongcheng City Health Bureau received a notification from Anhui, also immediately after the epidemiological investigation of more than 6,000 residents of Maqiao town, as of the day before yesterday, found 104 cases of positive antibodies to hepatitis C, confirmed the diagnosis of six cases of sick liver patients. According to reports, there are also many children infected with hepatitis C in villages such as Tangzhuang and Hongqi near the county town of Eddyang and outside the town of Dan in Anhui. The exact number of infected people cannot be counted yet. Hepatitis C is transmitted only by blood, mother-to-child and sexual intercourse, and for young children, the only possibility, excluding the latter two, is blood transmission. According to reports, the largest infected child in Dancheng, Anhui province, is a teenager and the youngest is just a few months old, and has been sent to Hefei, Nanjing, Beijing and Shanghai for treatment respectively. However, some experts say that the cure rate for hepatitis C is only fifty to sixty percent. When interviewed, the parents of these children were worried about not being able to afford the medical bills, not being able to cure their children, and worried about their children’s future, fearing that their children would be discriminated against and unable to lead a normal life. A father surnamed Zhang, who originally worked outside the home, quit his job for his child’s illness and returned home to stay with his wife to take care of his baby: “If my child is not cured of hepatitis C, after a few years, the child is gone, what is the use of my work to earn more money?” This is not the first outbreak of public health incidents related to blood infections in Henan, in the 1980s and 1990s, the province’s Shangcai County was the hardest hit by blood-borne love disease, local farmers sold blood because of poverty, and due to irregularities in the operation of blood stations led to cross-infection, resulting in the spread of AIDS in the blood-selling population.