LGBTQ Breaking News Service

BlueCity, owner of China’s largest dating app for gay men Blued, said on Tuesday that it has obtained a license for an Internet hospital in China for the brand’s health service platform.

The establishment of the He Health Internet Hospital allows BlueCity to offer a more comprehensive set of health services, including consultation on issues like erectile dysfunction, premature ejaculation, HIV testing and prevention, as well as drug accessibility services, the company said in a press release.

“This essentially closes a glaring gap in the field of men’s health in China, itself a sector that is expected grow significantly over the next few years,” the company said.

Doctors and medical professionals will be able to offer their expertise and advice to patients through virtual consultations on the firm’s own platform, rather than forcing BlueCity to rely on third platy platforms.

“We’re delighted to open what will be China’s first Internet hospital focused on men’s health, tapping into a budding sector that we view as a key driver in the brand’s next phase of growth,” said BlueCity’s founder and chief executive Baoli Ma, adding that He Health achieved an eightfold increase in revenue in the fourth quarter of 2020.

SEE ALSO: Shares of Chinese LGBTQ Dating App Owner BlueCity Soar in Public Trading Debut on Nasdaq

Since its launch in March 2019, He Health has promoted awareness of men’s health and HIV prevention to tens of millions of users in China. It sells HIV diagnostic kits, brokers consultations with doctors and works with local authorities to direct users to free testing centers.

In 2012, Ma held face-to-face discussions with now Premier Li Keqiang regarding Blued’s contributions to combating the spread of HIV in mainland China.

The company said that in the fourth quarter of 2020, BlueCity’s revenue jumped 197.6% year-on-year to 45.7 million yuan ($7 million). Monthly active users of BlueCity’s apps, which include Blued and He Health, amounted to 7.6 million people in the fourth quarter of last year, an increase of 20.3% from the same period in 2019.

Blued started as an underground LGBTQ+ online forum at Danlan.org in 2000, operated by the then 23-year-old former police officer Ma. Twenty years later in July 2020, BlueCity went public with an $85 million debut on Nasdaq valuing the platform at $614 million. A month later, it bought Chinese lesbian dating app LESDO, and in November it acquired Finka, a social networking app for younger gay men.

According to a report by business consulting firm Frost and Sullivan, the scale of China’s online healthcare consultation sector, as well as its online prescriptions and pharmacy market, is expected to reach 523 billion yuan by 2025.

Notably, the report stated that the size of the men’s health and healthcare market in China is expected to reach 99.6 billion yuan by the same year.

Brooke Parker, an organizer with the group Solutions Oriented Addiction Response, displays an HIV testing kit in Charleston, W.Va., in March. Outbreaks of HIV/AIDS are expected to rise as resources have been redirected to the fight against COVID-19 — delaying and sometimes cutting off HIV testing and treatment. John Raby/AP hide caption

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John Raby/AP

Brooke Parker, an organizer with the group Solutions Oriented Addiction Response, displays an HIV testing kit in Charleston, W.Va., in March. Outbreaks of HIV/AIDS are expected to rise as resources have been redirected to the fight against COVID-19 — delaying and sometimes cutting off HIV testing and treatment.

John Raby/AP

Facing a yearlong siege from the coronavirus, the defenses in another, older war are faltering.

For the last two decades, HIV/AIDS has been held at bay by potent antiviral drugs, aggressive testing and inventive public education campaigns. But the COVID-19 pandemic has caused profound disruptions in almost every aspect of that battle, grounding outreach teams, sharply curtailing testing and diverting critical staff away from laboratories and medical centers.

The exact impact of one pandemic on the other is still coming into focus, but preliminary evidence is disturbing experts who have celebrated the enormous strides in HIV treatment. While the shift in priorities is nationwide, delays in testing and treatment carry particularly grievous risks in Southern states, now the epicenter of the nation’s HIV crisis.

“This is a major derailing,” says Dr. Carlos del Rio, a professor of medicine at Emory University in Atlanta and head of the Emory AIDS International Training and Research Program. “There will be damage. The question is, how much?”

Clinics have limited in-person visits, and doctors’ offices and emergency rooms have halted routine HIV screening, with physicians relying instead on video calls with patients, a futile alternative for those who are homeless or fear that family members will discover their status. Rapid-testing vans that once parked outside nightclubs and bars and handed out condoms are mothballed. And, in state capitals and county seats, government expertise has been singly focused on the all-hands-on-deck COVID-19 response.

Concrete signs of the impact on HIV surveillance abound: One large commercial lab reported nearly 700,000 fewer HIV screening tests across the U.S. — a 45% drop — and 5,000 fewer diagnoses between March and September 2020, compared with the same period the year before. Prescriptions for PrEP, a preexposure prophylaxis that can prevent HIV infection, also have fallen sharply, according to new research presented at a conference last month. State public health departments have recorded similarly steep declines in testing.

That dearth in new data has led to a precarious, unknowable moment: For the first time in decades, the nation’s lauded HIV surveillance system is blind to the virus’s movement.

Nowhere will the lack of data be felt more profoundly than in the South: The region accounts for 51% of new infections, 8 of the 10 states with the highest rates of new diagnoses and half of all HIV-related deaths, according to the most recent data available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, Georgia had the highest rate of new HIV diagnoses of any state, though lower than that of Washington, D.C. The Georgia Department of Public Health recorded a 70% drop in testing last spring compared with the spring of 2019.

The slowdown in HIV patient services “could be felt for years,” says Dr. Melanie Thompson, principal investigator of the AIDS Research Consortium of Atlanta.

She adds, “Every new HIV infection perpetuates the epidemic and will likely be passed to one or more people in the months to come if people are not diagnosed and offered HIV treatment.”

Coronavirus testing has commandeered the machines previously used for HIV testing, further straining surveillance efforts. The polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, machines used to detect and measure the genetic material in the human immunodeficiency virus are the same machines that run coronavirus tests around the clock.

Over the decades, as HIV migrated inland from coastal cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York, it took root in the South, where poverty is endemic, lack of health coverage is commonplace and HIV stigma is pervasive.

“There is the stigma that’s real. There is legacy racism,” says Dr. Thomas Giordano, medical director of Thomas Street Health Center in Houston, one of the largest HIV clinics in the United States. The state’s political leaders, he says, view HIV as “a disease of the poor, of Blacks, Latinos and gay. It’s just not mainstream at the state level.”

Black people represent 13% of the U.S. population but about 40% of HIV cases — and deaths. In many Southern states, the disparities are stark: In Alabama, Black residents account for 27% of the population and 72% of new diagnoses; in Georgia, Black people make up 33% of residents and 69% of people with HIV.

HIV clinics that serve low-income patients also face limitations in using video and phone appointments. Clinic directors say that poor patients often lack data plans and that many homeless patients simply don’t have phones. They also must contend with fear. “If a friend gave you a room to sleep and your friend finds out you have HIV, you might lose that place to sleep,” says del Rio of Emory University.

Texting can be tricky too. “We have to be cautious about text messages,” says Dr. John Carlo, CEO of Prism Health North Texas in Dallas. “If someone sees their phone, it can be devastating.”

In Mississippi, HIV contact tracing — which was used as a model for some local efforts to track the coronavirus — has been limited by coronavirus-related travel restrictions meant “to protect both staff and client,” says Melverta Bender, director of the STD/HIV office at the Mississippi State Department of Health.

Of all regions in the U.S., the South has the weakest health safety nets. And Southern states have far fewer resources than states like California and New York. “Our public health infrastructures have been chronically underfunded and undermined over the decades,” says Thompson, the Atlanta researcher. “So we stand to do worse by many metrics.”

Georgia’s high HIV infection rate and the state’s slow pace of COVID-19 vaccinations “are not unrelated,” Thompson says.

The porous safety net extends to health insurance, a vital need for those living with HIV. Nearly half of Americans without health coverage live in the South, where many states have not expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. That leaves many people with HIV to rely on the federal Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program and state-run AIDS drug assistance programs, known as ADAPs, which offer limited coverage.

“As a matter of equity, insurance is critical for people to live and thrive with HIV,” says Tim Horn, director of health care access at NASTAD, the National Alliance of State and Territorial AIDS Directors. Ryan White and ADAPs “are not equipped to provide that full sweep of comprehensive care,” he says.

Roshan McDaniel, South Carolina’s ADAP program manager, says 60% of South Carolinians enrolled in ADAP would qualify if her state expanded Medicaid. “The first few years, we thought about it,” says McDaniel. “We don’t even think about it nowadays.”

Enrollment in the Ryan White program jumped during the early months of the pandemic, when state economies froze and Americans hunkered down amid a grinding pandemic. Data from state health departments reflect the increased need. In Texas, enrollment in the state’s AIDS drug program increased 34% from March to December 2020. In Georgia, enrollment jumped 10%.

State health officials attribute the increased enrollment to pandemic-related job losses, especially in states that didn’t expand Medicaid. Antiretroviral treatment, the established regimen that suppresses the amount of virus in the body and prevents AIDS, costs up to $36,000 a year, and medication interruptions can lead to viral mutations and drug resistance.

But qualifying for state assistance is difficult: Approval can take up to two months, and missing paperwork can lead to canceled coverage.

Federal health experts say Southern states have generally lagged behind in getting patients into medical care and suppressing their viral loads, and people with HIV infections tend to go undiagnosed longer there than in other regions. In Georgia, for example, nearly 1 out of 4 people who learned they were infected developed AIDS within a year, indicating their infections had long gone undiagnosed.

As COVID-19 vaccinations become widely available and restrictions ease, HIV clinic directors are scouring their patient lists to determine whom they need to see first. “We are looking at how many people haven’t seen us in over a year. We think it’s over several hundred. Did they move? Did they move providers?” says Carlo, the doctor and health care CEO in Dallas. “We don’t know what the long- term consequences are going to be.”

Kaiser Health News produces in-depth journalism about health policy issues. Together with policy analysis and polling, KHN is one of the three major programs of the Kaiser Family Foundation, an endowed nonprofit, and is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

Mechelle Lewis Freeman didn’t plan to become an Olympian. She had dabbled in youth soccer and basketball and didn’t even pick up a pair of spikes until high school. But once she realized she was fast, she never looked back — except, maybe, to check on her competition. When asked why she stuck with track and field, Mechelle responds with an effortless confidence reserved only for women who have broken too many barriers to feign humility: “Because I was hella good.”

And she was. In high school, Mechelle won a state championship. Then, as a college athlete, she brought home the first national championship in any sport to the University of South Carolina. Then, in 2007, she became a world champion, which was only a precursor to her debut at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. Mechelle did all of this — dedicated her 20s, her body, her entire life to the sport — only to be told by a coworker years later that track was irrelevant.

After hanging up her spandex, Mechelle fell back on her master’s in communication to land a spot in Coca-Cola’s marketing program for retired Olympians. She soon transitioned to a role at an advertising agency, a career she’d eyed ever since watching Eddie Murphy’s Boomerang as a kid. “[When] I was working there, they were managing athletes,” Mechelle told POPSUGAR. “One day I was like, ‘Why don’t you have any track people on your roster?'” She was stunned when her coworker said that track athletes are only relevant every four years.

Mechelle, not oblivious to track’s standing in pop culture relative to other sports, rejected the notion that her career didn’t matter until she reached the Olympic stage. She was called a track girl long before then and, through a position as a Team USA assistant coach, would be one for the foreseeable future. Spurred by this stubborn refusal to relegate her life’s work into a societal junk drawer, she used her influence to boisterously defend the sport’s place in the American canon.

In 2015, Mechelle — alongside fellow track athlete Jennifer Forrester — founded TrackGirlz, a nonprofit providing mentorship and financial assistance to young girls in the sport. According to the Women’s Sports Foundation, girls are twice as likely as boys to drop out of sports by age 14 due to lack of opportunity or resources, but those who stick with a team, especially in track and field, are more likely to achieve high academic marks and have steadfast goals of attending a four-year university. TrackGirlz, as a result, isn’t simply a sports enhancement program but a community-based program teaching girls to set and achieve goals in every aspect of their lives.

Outdoor track and field doesn’t have a national league, and what little coverage it does get orbits around the Olympic schedule, giving kids few chances to find role models in track and field, compared to male-dominated sports like football and baseball. Mechelle wants to change that and hopes TrackGirlz’s workshops and scholarships will provide a way to do it. “I want to showcase the influence and impact of women in the sport,” Mechelle told POPSUGAR.

For the workshops, Mechelle relies on her network of world-renowned athletes (many of which are her former teammates) to pair girls with “high-level mentors” at touring training camps. The second front is the nonprofit’s grant program. “We can support them financially to participate in tracking their local communities,” Mechelle said. “Our mission is giving girls access to track and field.” Brands including Lululemon and JackRabbit have already signed on, and as social media makes it easier to spread awareness of now-dubbed “track girls,” she thinks even more sponsors are on the way.

In the meantime, Mechelle is staying in the trenches to provide incomparable training and guidance to girls looking for sisterhood and strength through sport, especially during the pandemic. Before COVID hit, TrackGirlz was already getting swarms of positive feedback on the program’s impact on young girls, but this connection through track has become even more important to participants during the past year. “A parent wrote us during COVID and said, ‘If you didn’t keep our girls motivated, we don’t know what they would have done. Thank you for being there,'” Mechelle said.

There with the next generation of track stars is a place Mechelle likes to be, but caring for her own resident track kids is the ultimate goal. As a mother of two who’s still wrestling with entering her 40s, Mechelle says everything she does is to set up her kids’ futures. Growing her nonprofit into a global movement, toying with the idea of being head relay coach for Team USA, launching TrackGirlz apparel — it’s all to make her kids’ future a bit easier.

A scroll through Mechelle’s timeline, full of anti-white-supremacy and pro-Black Lives Matter posts, will tell you why she, perhaps more than other parents, feels the need to do so. “Whatever I do, I want to make sure I’m making a lot of money so that my generational wealth plan is set up, and then [I can] do whatever the hell I want,” Mechelle explained. “I’m on the Beyoncé plan.”