In Mae Chan in rural Thailand, many sectors of a community have come together to share their expertise and knowledge in a campaign to tame the spread of HIV/AIDS. Volunteers spread the word about AIDS, promote condom use, care for patients in their homes, and counsel the depressed. A youth group holds regular puppet shows in schools and community centers to talk about AIDS, unprotected sex and drugs. Monks offer herbal medicines and spiritual counseling. One key aspect of the program is village meetings involving people with HIV/AIDS, including former prostitutes, who tell their stories to educate others.

Started in 1991 by the Mae Chan community hospital, the project was hailed this year by the UN Development Program (UNDP) as a "good practice" that can provide lessons to other communities around the world. Mae Chan's motto is "Prevention is better than cure." Lee-Nah Hsu, manager of UNDP's Southeast Asia AIDS Project, documented the success in Mae Chan on a UNDP Web site. She said she has been flooded with e-mail requests for information, including one from a Muslim religious leader keen to help people living with HIV in his Arab community.

Mae Chan, home to 120,000 people, is a fitting place for the program. A hilly and lush farming district, it is in the northern Chiang Rai province, also the AIDS capital of Thailand. Its 1.25 million people comprise just 1.9 percent of the country's population of 62 million but account for 10 percent of its AIDS cases. Nearly 1 million people in Thailand have been infected with HIV. Of them, 300,000 have died. Health experts think that at least 200,000 lives were saved by a successful condom campaign in 1990-1991 that is estimated to have brought the infection rate down by 80 percent.

Back to other CDC news for August 20, 2001

Previous Updates | Search the CDC archive