DONGHU, China - Neighbors remember when young Dong Yangnan was a "xiao pangzi," or little fatty, the kind of husky, moon-cheeked child that Chinese grandmothers adore. Today, at 12, he is orphaned, stick thin and dressed in tattered clothes.

Last summer, his mother died of AIDS. His father, coughing and feverish, succumbed to the disease in May. Yangnan lives with an elderly grandfather, surviving on rice gruel and steamed buns.

"Before, I had a happy life, and my parents took good care of me," he said listlessly, his big eyes staring away to a lost past. "Now I have to look after myself and often have no money."

AIDS is creating an explosion of destitute orphans here in China's rural heartland and is driving large numbers of families into such dire poverty that they can no longer afford to feed or clothe, much less educate, their children.

At the start of last year, there were no orphans in this village in southern Henan Province. Today, because of AIDS, there are nearly 20, and hundreds more are likely to face a similar fate within a year or two. Residents estimate that 200 of the village's 600 families have one parent dead and the other ill, often too frail to work or even rise from bed. They receive little government help.

According to unpublished statistics from the United Nations Development Program, the number of families living below the official poverty line in Xincai, the county that includes Donghu, skyrocketed last year, to 270,000 from 40,000. Breadwinners fell ill, and families spent whatever they could scrape together for food and care.

Experts say the blow dealt by AIDS to villages like Donghu has been sharper and crueler than anywhere else in the world because of the unusual and efficient way the disease spread here.

Nearly the entire adult population of some villages was infected almost simultaneously in the 1990's as poor farmers flocked en masse to blood collection stations whose unsterile practices introduced hefty doses of H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, directly into their veins. Now, the victims - including many married couples - are falling ill and dying almost in unison.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/25/international/asia/25ORPH.html?ex=1030852800&en=6c93168f0ae28e56&ei=5006&partner=ALTAVISTA1