In the Taipei Times, a doctor writes about her experiences visiting China’s AIDS-plagued villages as a volunteer for Medicins sans Frontieres and the challenges facing doctors and patients in China: “This new anti-HIV/AIDS campaign, which the international community has lauded, is more open and proactive than before. But it must still operate in the context of a closed society, where government control over the media limits the flow of information necessary to deal with any public health epidemic. Moreover, it is unclear how care will be delivered to the rural front lines, where the old system of clinics based in Peoples’ Communes collapsed with the de-collectivization of agriculture… There is no quick-fix solution to ending China’s AIDS crisis. Officials there must focus not only on developing a pragmatic, realistic healthcare infrastructure in rural areas, but also on bringing about greater openness in China’s media in order to spread life-saving public information. ” The full story is here.
Last year, MSF opened an AIDS clinic in Hubei province.
