Word: yunnan
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...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...
...broaden the scope of his efforts, Ho enlisted the support of the newly appointed director of the province's Bureau of Health, Chen Juemin. Chen, to Ho's relief, is intent on addressing the AIDS epidemic in his province and is eager to have Yunnan serve as a testing ground for programs that Minister of Health Wu in Beijing will consider for the rest of the country. "This situation will not just go away," Chen told TIME. "We probably lost a chance [of controlling AIDS] because we did not open up publicly about our HIV work in the early 1980s...
...Mangxi, Yunnan The lab, such as it is, consists of just three rooms squeezed into a four-story building deep in Yunnan's southwestern town of Mangxi. The building has no elevator, and the external stairwell is bathed in the steamy heat that washes the entire region. Inside, however, in stark contrast to its tropical-outpost surroundings, are a few jewels of the modern microbiology trade?a state-of-the-art freezer for storing blood samples and an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), a machine for screening HIV that can identify specific antibodies to the virus...
...equipment, including a computer and fax machine, all donated by Ho, will enable Mangxi to share vital data with Kunming, 450 km away, and with Ho's group in the U.S. Yunnan's first case of HIV infection was discovered in Mangxi in 1989. Presumably the virus has been circulating here the longest; being able to include patients from the region in his study will enable Ho to tell how quickly the virus is mutating and which strains should be part of his experimental inoculation...
...likely source of research subjects is the drug-rehabilitation camps that are blossoming all over Yunnan. A drug user picked up by the police is often forced to serve a mandatory three-month sentence in a rehabilitation camp, where calisthenics, lectures and daily treatment with a Chinese version of methadone are supposed to curb the addict's habit. Up to 20% of the inmates, by the guards' rough estimates, are HIV positive; because they are registered by the police, they can be tracked after they leave the camps. Eventually Ho wants to find and monitor 500 HIV-negative patients...