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To 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. We didn't realize then that the disease was so serious and could spread so fast."
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.
The 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.
In Mangxi, Ho's priority is to sign up subjects, not an easy task when many of the prospective candidates are IV drug users and live in remote, largely inaccessible villages without telephones or newspapers; in fact, few of them can even read. Local health officials conduct their prevention efforts the old-fashioned way--going family to family, teaching couples how to use condoms and warning the young about the dangers of sharing needles.
One 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 in the Mangxi area who are at high risk of becoming infected. Merging information on how many in this population eventually become HIV positive with data from the urban residents of Kunming will help him measure how quickly the virus is spreading.
HENAN PROVINCE