Ray Yip, director of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation China program.
Ray Yip, MD, an expert on HIV/AIDS and director of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s China Program, issued a stern warning to China’s gays, urging them to “engage their community to take part in the intervention.”
According to the news site Xinhua, Yip called HIV transmission through gay sex “one of the biggest emerging challenges,” citing a drastic increase in transmissions among men who have sex with men since 2003. The site reports that according to the Chinese Ministry of Health, last year “MSM transmission accounted for 32.5 percent of China's total HIV/AIDS infections, up from only 0.4 percent in 2005.”
“We need the MSM group to engage their community to take part in the intervention,” the doctor said, asking, “Will they promote safe sex? Will they be promoting early testing? Will they be supporting people already with HIV? So the key is their involvement in the prevention."
Chinese society often makes it difficult for those with HIV, especially gay men, to admit to it. Yin fears that many infected citizens do not take advantage of free government HIV testing. He explains, “"It is those people who don't know they are HIV carriers are dangerous. We need to find them.”
Yip, the former director of the Global AIDS Program in China, holds medical and master of public health degrees from University of Minnesota.
The Gates Foundation has so far committed $50 million to cooperative programs with the Chinese government and local nongovernmental organizations, including a $7 million grant to Peking University for HIV prevention research.
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