Word: yunnan
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...equipment, including a computer and fax machine, all donated by Ho, will enable Mangxi to share vital data with Kunming, 280 miles 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...
...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...
...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...
Here, unlike in Yunnan, HIV spread not through illegal behavior but through blood donation. In the early 1990s, the Chinese leadership launched a blood drive and paid donors for their plasma. It was a program intended to benefit all Chinese--the poor by giving them a way to supplement their income, and the rest of China by replenishing the national blood banks' dangerously low stocks. "It was like a poverty-relief program," says a Henan resident who gave plasma in 1993 and became infected. Through campaigns in the villages and schools, the government encouraged rural farmers and factory workers...
Henan and its neighbors, Ho has decided, cannot wait for his program to become established in Yunnan. In his proposal to the Ministry of Health, Ho has modified his plan to include testing, treatment and prevention projects for Henan and Yunnan. "They desperately want help," he says of the doctors he met in Wenlou. "They obviously have the data on AIDS patients but are afraid to show...