Heroes are most often ordinary people who do extraordinary things.
Ordinary, however, is hardly the most accurate word to describe two physicians crusading against HIV/AIDS in northern Thailand for the past 15 years.
ILLUSTATION: MOUNTAIN PEOPLE
Thai doctors Prakong and Vicharn Vithayasai displayed ultimate courage and compassion while colleagues balked at treating AIDS-stricken patients when the grisly disease first appeared in the city of Chiang Mai, 550km north of Bangkok, in the mid-1980s.
The husband-and-wife team witnessed first hand the horrors of AIDS at the Maharaj Nakorn Chiang Mai Hospital, where they worked during the onset of the epidemic in the area.
They were left to tend to 2,000 AIDS-infected patients dying from the unknown illness that ravaged bodies with ghastly sores and dripping infections. Other doctors at the hospital refused to treat adults, or the burgeoning number of abandoned AIDS babies who overwhelmed the children's ward.
"Most of the doctors in Chiang Mai refused to take care of HIV/AIDS victims," recalls Dr. Prakong, 58, dubbed the godmother of HIV-infected children by local media.
"Doctors not only in Chiang Mai, but also in the surrounding provinces, referred nearly all (AIDS) cases to our hospital. They said they did not know how to treat them, but I know they were afraid of getting HIV."
Prakong, a doctor of immunology, began working 12-15-hour days attempting to treat and comfort the scores of frightened victims, wasting away from the alien illness and its horrific physical effects.
But it was the abandoned and orphaned children that affected Prakong and Vicharn the most. So they decided to do something about it.
"At that time, the government orphanage house did not want to take care of these kids," says Vicharn, a pediatrician and immunologist.
"They said that they didn't know how."
In 1991, with the hospital's children ward bursting at the seams with abandoned AIDS-afflicted children, Vicharn again approached the government orphanage to give the facts about AIDS and its transmission. To its credit, he says, the orphanage took in a small number of the children, "but basically put them in one corner until they died".
The doctors decided dying AIDS children needed homes that would provide tender care in a family atmosphere. In 1992 -- with the help of a Swiss millionaire who read about their plans in The New York Times -- they launched the Support the Children Foundation (SCF), establishing four homes for orphaned or abandoned children infected with HIV.
The goal was to give love and health care to the dying youngsters in a family-type setting, and to set an example for government organizations and NGOs that compassion for AIDS victims must overcome fear.
SCF has nurtured and nourished 74 children at its four houses since 1992. Although heroic, Prakong and Vicharn's efforts were not without hardship and pain.
Twenty-five SCF children died in the early years before AIDS drugs were developed, the stigma of the disease keeping to be concealed for fear of community revolts.
"I felt very sad when the children began dying after so many years with us," says Dr. Vicharn. "We gave every effort to help them, but their deaths just made us work even harder."
Those efforts eventually paid off. With the advent of anti-retroviral drugs and the intensified care of Prakong -- who took early retirement to concentrate on the SCF -- none of the 24 children currently housed have died in the past seven years.
"With the anti-retroviral drugs they have very few opportunistic infections now," says Dr. Prakong. "They have much better quality of life and look like normal children, and all of them attend normal schools without discrimination."
The story of the fight against AIDS in Chiang Mai is one of success. While Prakong and Vicharn treated AIDS patients at the hospital and cared for the children at the SCF houses, they also launched an education campaign to tackle the disease at its root cause: sexual transmission.
Thailand's commercial sex industry posed a substantial obstacle. The first HIV seropositive female sex-worker was detected in July 1988, and the HIV epidemic in Chiang Mai spread like wildfire thereafter.
Chiang Mai had the highest HIV seropositive numbers and infection rate in 1989, and even outpaced Bangkok until 1993.
In 1989 Chiang Mai -- a city of 1.5 million -- represented about 53 percent of the entire country's AIDS cases. By 2001, however, new infections totalled just 8.27 percent of all AIDS cases in Thailand -- more than a significant decline.
Prakong and Vicharn played a substantial role in curtailing the disease in northern Thailand.
"They are some of the key people in Thailand fighting HIV/AIDS," says Vibeke Lyssand Leirvaag of the Norwegian Businessmen in Thailand, one of the SCF's sponsors.
"It breaks your heart in one way, but you see that it's really worthwhile to be a sponsor when you go there. You can see that the children are well taken care of with medicines, and they receive all the love they need. It's really amazing what they've done," Leirvaag says.
HIV/AIDS is far from under control in Thailand, however. In 2001, 55,000 people died, according to UNAIDS. About 290,000 children are orphans because of the disease.
After 15 years of battling the disease with all of the time, effort, and resources they could muster, Vicharn and Prakong are trying to find adoptive families willing to care of the kids so they can concentrate on AIDS research, education and their outreach programme during their well-deserved retirement years.
Originally the plan was to find families in Europe, North America and Australia where the children could get free ARV drugs from hospitals. But that plan fell through.
"We are now getting old and will be unable to take care of these 24 AIDS kids soon," Prakong says. "Unfortunately, the laws in these countries obstruct HIV-positive children from being adopted.
Therefore, our next aim is to find 24 kind, rich families in Thailand to foster them."
Funding is also a concern with global economic woes pinching donors' charitable ways. AIDS drugs cost the SCF 4.3 million baht (US$100,933) a year, while caring for the children in the four homes totals 2 million baht (US$46,945) annually.
"No, they don't have enough money," Leirvaag replies when asked.
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