Despite uncertainty about the funding source, Pan Congbin, an official in northwest China's Gansu Province, is determined to carry on the AIDS control campaign in his community after the conclusion in mid October of a public education program on the prevention of the epidemic.

The leader of Jinyangli Community with a population of 16,700 in Jinchang City, known as China's capital of nickel, believes that AIDS is posing an impending threat to his community and prevention is a must-take lesson for this industrial city.

In his community there are over 70 known drug addicts, but there are also underground sex workers who are mostly "invisible," says Pan, who doubles as community director and secretary of the Communist Party's working committee in Jinyangli. "Both groups are highly vulnerable to HIV," he says.

Such a situation, says Pan, makes it necessary for his community to constantly raise residents' awareness to prevent the epidemic, though the public education campaign sponsored by the China AIDS Roadmap Tactical Support (CHARTS) Project was over.

The conclusion of the campaign in Jinyangli means the community might no longer get fund from the Sino-British project, but Pan says, "I believe we still need such campaigns. So, we may squeeze some money from next year's budget on law and anti-drug education for the cause if we cannot find other sponsors."

This marked a great departure from his indifference to the epidemic before. "I felt AIDS had little, if not nothing, to do with my work as community head," Pan confesses. "I would be fine as long as I kept myself away from the fouls that could lead to contamination."

And Pan was not alone among local grassroots officials, according to Du Shuqi, deputy director of the social research section of provincial government's policy research center. In a province with several hundred reported cases of HIV infection among a population of more than 26 million, people in Gansu tend to think the epidemic is still far away from them, says Du.

But a training program targeted at grassroots officials like Pan Congbin organized by CHARTS changed the situation. At least Pan was turned into a "secretary for AIDS prevention," as so he is nicknamed by locals.

"Many came to the training course thinking AIDS prevention was a personal business and ignorant of their duty in the national prevention and control campaign," Du says, who is also a lecturer for the training program. "The CHARTS training program was designed to change such thinking and oblige officials at grassroots levels to be involved in the AIDS prevention drive."

The training course usually consisted of three parts: national situation of the AIDS epidemic, state policy in prevention and control, and prevention know-how. Lecturers would spend more time on basic prevention knowledge as grassroots officials usually lack, but are expected to help spread, such know-how, Du says.

Pan says he was brainwashed at the course where he came to know AIDS or HIV can be so close to himself and his community, and he no longer holds the prevention of AIDS is the exclusive business of health and medical workers.

And a brainwashed Pan was alerted to a more serious scenario of the epidemic in his city and community after the training course in April 2007: Before he attended the CHARTS workshop, Jinchang's reported HIV/AIDS cases stood at 10, but twenty days after that, the figure climbed to 11.

This "sudden" rise made Pan believe that the actual infection figure might be even larger in the city which has a population of about half a million, as some of possible HIV carriers could be still in hide due to unawareness of the infection or fear of discrimination after exposure. He even guesses that there could be infection cases in his own community.

He was even more appalled at the rise of infection cases throughout Gansu. By September 2007, Gansu reported a total of 414 HIV/AIDS cases, and the number of newly found infections in the first half of this year hit 79, surpassing that of the whole of last year.

"Never before had I realized that the threat of AIDS was so imminent to me and my community, and every one of us should do something for the control of the epidemic," Pan says. "For officials, no matter how low they are ranked, they should not play safe by keeping themselves clean from the disease while standing aloof from the national battle against AIDS. They are bound to the duty of helping raise AIDS prevention awareness among people around them."

Pan's will to bear his share in the battle was materialized when the CHARTS project funded his community 50,000 yuan (about US$6,700) for public education to raise AIDS prevention awareness.

As the most grassroots administration organs in cities that have immediate contact with residents, communities can serve as important platforms in the national campaign to control the spread of HIV/AIDS, Pan says.

Pretty soon Pan became known as "secretary for AIDS prevention" when his education campaigns reached schools, factories and drug addicts, and his anti-AIDS billboards and film shows created quite a stir in the largest park in the city of Jinchang.

Pan's education campaign covered all the 6,000 students and teachers in the schools located in his community, who listened to lectures and watched picture exhibitions on AIDS prevention. This means almost each of the community's 6,450 families had a member that had got the lesson.

Pan expects that the students can pass on what they have learnt to their parents and other family members. To gain a similar "snowball" effect, Pan's community also selected one volunteer from each local enterprise and mobilized retirees to help spread AIDS prevention knowledge among their colleagues, friends and neighbors.

But for sex workers, Pan's campaign went on without notice. "We could not gather them together in the public because of their secret status. Instead, we community workers went to entertainment venues for behavior intervention to keep them alerted of the disease," Pan says. Special training on the methadone therapy was offered to drug users in addition to the conventional know-how on AIDS prevention, according to Pan.

Pan was among more than 20,000 grassroots officials in Gansu Province who received the CHARTS training. The massive training program started in 2006 and has covered all the 86 counties and districts in the province, according to Du Shuqi. The trainees ranged from local publicity officials, family planning officials and anti-drug police to community heads like Pan.

Since the first reported case in 1985, the virus of AIDS has contaminated all the 31 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions on the Chinese mainland. The reported cases of infection is growing by 30 percent annually in average, topping 183,000 by the end of October, 2006, according to the Ministry of Health.

Ignorance of the threat and widespread discrimination against the disease are believed by sociologists and medical experts as major obstacles that may hinder the country's prevention and control efforts.

To set up an effective network of AIDS prevention, China has adopted an epidemic control policy which stresses the government's leading role but at the same time calls for multi-department cooperation and involvement of non-governmental organizations and the whole society.

Officials, following the generally-believed most vulnerable groups of sex workers, drug addicts and migrant workers, have become another major target in the country's campaign to raise AIDS prevention awareness.

"To bring the government's role into full play, we must engage every official in the cause against AIDS and encourage them to take the lead," says Li Liping, a CHARTS project official.

As in the words of Jin Wei, a professor with the Party School of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, officials, as policy makers and implementers, can play an important role in the country's battle against AIDS if they are aware of the serious situation and their responsibilities.

Gansu may serve as a model for its initiative and efforts in promoting AIDS prevention awareness as a province with a low rate of HIV infection, says the professor.

Jin Wei helped launch a workshop on AIDS prevention policy at the Party School in 2001, a move regarded as a breakthrough at a time when the disease was still a topic of taboo that no official would like to pick up.

Similar training programs, however, have now expanded to 19 provincial and five municipal party schools across the country, and 11 of them have listed AIDS prevention policy as a regular course for trainees, according to the professor.

A local regulation which was put into effect in March in east China's Zhejiang Province requires that AIDS prevention tactics should be a mandatory training content for officials.

Though it is hard to estimate the exact effect of the AIDS policy training programs, says Li Liping of CHARTS, the story of Pan Congbin has at least indicated that the education on officials has started to work.

And the education campaign has even made Pan's lecturers like Jin Wenjun feel refreshed.

Anything but an AIDS prevention expert, Jin, an associate professor at the Party School of the CPC Gansu Provincial Committee, was selected with other five people from 10 lecturer candidates for the CHARTS training program. Before that Jin herself received a week of training on epidemic knowledge and state policies on AIDS prevention.

Jin admits that the program has offered herself a chance to broaden her vision in research. As a demographer, Jin began to take interest in and reevaluate the province's strategy of developing labor-supply economy. Jin warns that Gansu may be under an increasing threat of AIDS as the province's huge army of migrant laborers to Sichuan and Xinjiang, two of the country's major AIDS-plagued places, could mean high spread risks of the epidemic.

She says the province should take corresponding measures to avoid possible increase of infections through the channel of migrant laborers.

Jin says she is now also preparing for a research on an administration performance evaluation framework for family planning officials, which will include their work in AIDS prevention. Family planning officials should and can play an important role in the country's anti-AIDS campaign, and so it is necessary to evaluate them on their work in this regard, Jin says.

But she admits she had never imagined doing such research before taking part in the CHARTS training program.

"Of course, I had already been aware of the importance of AIDS prevention before I was involved in the program, but that was only for myself and my family. Now, I wish to work for the national prevention campaign as much as I'm concerned, in both the training program and my research. So I think my awareness of prevention now carries more weight," Jin says.

(Xinhua News Agency November 27, 2007)