Word: yunnan
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Tracking HIV Yunnan is China's fourth largest province and historically one of its most mysterious and remote. (Its picturesque landscape of verdant hills and rustic villages inspired the legend of Shangri-La.) Its distance from the political leaders in Beijing has traditionally made it something of an outlaw province, home to dozens of minority groups and, in centuries past, feudal warlords who ruled with nearly absolute control. Today it is the gateway for heroin traffic that drifts into China from Burma, Vietnam and Laos...
...Scattered along the drug route is China's largest concentration of heroin addicts. Yunnan has the highest IV-drug-use rates in China, and a recent U.N. AIDS report estimates that anywhere from 50% to 80% of the users are carrying the AIDS virus. HIV spread via unprotected sex is also on the rise here, accounting for 15% of HIV infections in 2000. All told, say health officials in Yunnan, this single province accounts for one-third of China's reported AIDS cases...
...keeping, it's no surprise that officials here have been collecting and analyzing information on these cases for more than a decade. But access to the data?especially for outsiders?has been carefully guarded. The man in charge of generating the statistics is Dr. Lu Lin, director of the Yunnan Center for Disease Control (CDC), who has been monitoring HIV infection among the highest-risk groups in nearly 50 sites around the province since...
...return, Ho has asked for access to the blood samples?some 24,000?collected from HIV patients throughout the province over the years. The samples will give him critical information about which populations in Yunnan would be suitable as the first subjects for his vaccine trials. "We realized we needed a quid pro quo," he says...
...part of that exchange, Lu's CDC team shared with Ho, in the first presentation of its kind to anyone outside the Chinese government, the details of AIDS penetration in Yunnan. Last March Lu informed Ho that in a 2002 survey of high-risk populations, 43% of IV drug users had shared needles with others in the past month, and that among female sex workers, 89% were unaware of their risk of contracting HIV. A majority of sex workers, about 60%, reported inconsistent condom use. Since they have begun collecting data, says Lu, there has been...