Kong Chunyi, 35, is in the prime of his working life, but he's given up hope of finding a city job like so many of his rural peers, because of the scary name of his disease: AIDS.

He doesn't even need to tell prospective employers about his disease.

"The name of my home village on my ID card scares employers because Wenlou Village is universally known as an AIDS village," he said.

Contaminated blood transfusions given to poor farmers before 2000 have spread the disease in rural areas in central China's Henan Province. In Wenlou, 70 percent of the families in the village have someone infected, said Zhou Yunyun, a village official.

He said there were 368 HIV carriers in the village, or about 10 percent of the population, as of November. No new AIDS cases have been diagnosed in Wenlou in the past few years.

Graves scattered among the farm fields remind people that hundreds of AIDS patients have died over the past few years. An air of pessimism hangs over life.

"AIDS patients can get free medical care here, but their lives have not improved much" because the disease limits their employment prospects, said Kong.

Things began to change after a factory cultivating edible mushrooms was set up in Wenlou last year. It offered jobs to AIDS patients like Kong.

"The plant employs as many as 200 farmers in the busy seasons of spring and autumn, when a day of work can yield 45 yuan (US$6.55)," said Kong. He said about 80 percent of the workers in the plant were AIDS patients.

The plant earned 1.65 million yuan from the spring harvest, and the outlook for the autumn harvest is expected to be about the same, said Yue Dongfeng, an agronomist-turned businessman, who founded the plant in Wenlou.

He said the farmers were enthusiastic about growing mushrooms as a cash crop. But he was finding it tough to sell the product, because anything made in Wenlou encounters market prejudice.

"We have not developed a brand name for our mushroom products, because the village name" has a negative image, said Yue. Although people know the virus isn't transmitted through food, the plant does not allow patients to work in picking and packaging, according to Yue.

(Shanghai Daily December 8, 2008)