The country's top health authority is recruiting high-level health professionals to guide the anti-HIV/AIDS campaign in poor and remote areas.

Specialists, who can be domestic or overseas residents, are wanted and will be sent to Liangshan Prefecture, an area hit hard by the deadly virus in southwest China's Sichuan Province, for at least four months.

The recruitment is co-sponsored by Chinese authorities and global pharmaceutical company Merck Sharp & Dohme (MSD) in a program aimed at developing a workable approach to preventing the disease.

The professionals' tasks include training local health workers, launching and enhancing HIV/AIDS management programs and also evaluating overall strategies in the fight against the disease in Liangshan.

Those who want the job should "have worked at in-patient or infectious disease departments in universities, hospitals and other medical institutions for at least five years," the Ministry of Health said on its website.

They are expected to carry out skills training and design curricula for local health workers, it added.

They should also be able to speak both English and Chinese, while all their expenses will be covered by the program.

Detailed recruitment information can be downloaded from the ministry's website - www.moh.gov.cn.

In Liangshan, HIV is spreading mainly among drug users through the sharing of contaminated hypodermic syringes.

"We urgently feel the need for professionals to help our work here," said Xie Nianzhi, deputy director of the Infectious Disease Prevention Center of Xichang, the prefecture's capital.

"Because many villages are hard to access owing to their remoteness and backward transport facilities, our education program has difficulty reaching out to local residents," he said in a telephone interview yesterday.

"It's not uncommon to see drug users in these villages, and the disease is spreading quickly."

In China, which has an estimated 840,000 HIV carriers, the lack of professionals working in treating AIDS patients and carrying out intervention activities among high-risk groups, such as drug users and prostitutes, is a big headache for the government, said Hao Yang, vice-director of the Disease Control Department of the ministry.

Due to the lack of medical services supplied by qualified doctors, many sufferers stop taking the anti-viral medication offered free by local governments, Hao said. This is especially true in rural areas where more than 70 per cent of the country's HIV/AIDS patients are found, statistics show.

Moreover, most of the country's limited number of professionals are now working in big hospitals and the disease control centers of big cities, experts noted.

This program shows that China has opened its doors to international businesses to help in the fight against the disease, experts said.

(China Daily August 31, 2005)