Word: yunnan
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...experimental AIDS vaccine must be designed to match the rapidly changing strains moving through a population. Ho needs access to the blood of a lot of HIV-positive patients, so when he started looking for a place in China to conduct his trials, he turned first to Yunnan, a province with one of the greatest numbers of HIV and AIDS cases. His hope was that health officials there, who see the daily toll the disease takes, would be more willing to accept help from an outsider. It wasn't that simple...
...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...