Word: viruses
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...reason Dr. David Ho has come to China. The New York City-based virologist was named TIME's 1996 Person of the Year for his pioneering work on the drug therapies that have largely quelled the AIDS epidemic in the U.S. and Europe. Now Ho is confronting the AIDS virus in its most populous stronghold. Up to 1 million Chinese are HIV positive, and that number could easily grow to 10 million by 2010, according to the Joint U.N. Program on AIDS. If current trends continue for another decade or so, China could overtake Africa, where 29 million people have...
...They seem out of place in the world of AIDS. Neither injects drugs. Neither has had any contact with the sex trade. But they represent the newest and most troubling front in China's war against the AIDS virus. As in other countries hit by HIV, the epidemic in China began in the margins of society?among migrant workers, drug users and prostitutes?and then gradually entered the mainstream population. In China this process was facilitated by the government, which, through the tragic mismanagement of its blood-buying program in the early 1990s, permitted blood-collecting practices that ended...
...That was how this couple, who declined to give their names, got the AIDS virus. They have kept it a secret from everyone but their immediate family, preferring not to risk being ostracized by their community. "Nobody knows," says the wife quietly. "They would not understand." The husband, as far as they can determine, was the first to get infected, perhaps from blood transfusions during surgery. It wasn't until his wife required an operation in 2001, however, that they were both found to be HIV positive. "I could not believe it," she says. "I told them they were totally...
...part of a treatment program that Ho established in Kunming. There they will get the latest antiretroviral medications and the same careful monitoring that AIDS patients in the U.S. receive, including regular measurements of their viral loads and their immune-cell counts and tests to determine how quickly the virus is mutating to resist the drugs...
...powerful as the AIDS drugs are, HIV mutates so rapidly that if the antiretroviral compounds are not properly administered, they are quickly rendered useless not just for that patient but for every other patient exposed to the mutated virus. It's a concept that is difficult for even the best-intentioned patients here to appreciate. TIME spoke with a patient advocate, 31, who goes by the pseudonym Ke'Er. He was infected after selling blood and was admitted to a study in Beijing that provided free U.S. antiretroviral drugs, but he accidentally left his two-month supply on the train...