Lessons in taking good care

Teaching young to guard health of their families in Xinjiang Uygur region Marjorie Yang can still remember the shock she had when finding out that the most expensive medicine in a public health center at a small town in Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region was ice. "This means that the people living there almost had no medicine at all, which is beyond imagination," china tour packages.As chairman of Esquel Group, a leading Hong Kong-based textile and apparel manufacturer with operations throughout the world, Yang went to Xinjiang with the Jiankangkuaiche project, which literally means Health Express, a program launched by Esquel Group and Swiss pharmaceutical maker Novartis International AG in 2010 with the aim of improving the medical treatment and health of people living in Xinjiang, especially those in rural areas.The program consists of three elements - health-education for primary and middle school students, medical training about infectious diseases for physicians and support for the research of epidemic diseases related to Brucella, a potentially fatal parasitic bacteria.In order to carry out the health education project more effectively, the two companies have worked together to recruit health education training specialists from local residents. So far they have developed 24 full-time specialists as health educators, all of whom are from ethnic groups. The textbooks are written in Chinese and the Uygur language.Students can take classes in the psychology of adolescence and physical health and then become guardians of health in their families.

"The health education project can create extended beneficial effects on the families of the children who receive our lessons on health because the adults' access to knowledge about health is rather limited and, for some of them, knowledge of Mandarin is not great," said Helen Chui, president of Novartis Group (China)."My father used to smoke a lot and, after I learned from the class that smoking can lead to cancer, I told him immediately. He was quite shocked at this and finally made up his mind to quit smoking," said a girl named Guli.The poor roads and lack of infrastructure in the rural areas of Xinjiang made it a lot harder for health education teachers to carry out their work."The furthest school is about 80 kilometers away from the downtown area and we have to take several buses, a three-wheeled bicycle and even walk a few minutes to get there," said local resident Aliye Kurban.Several times she burst into tears when she got lost and could not find the school.Despite the work being arduous and painstaking, she doesn't regret her choice. "I feel that what I'm doing now is really something of significance to my hometown," said the young mother whose baby is only 1 year old.Speaking of the difficulty in promoting the program in Xinjiang, kashgar border transfer Yang said: "It is the process of learning the culture, history, social customs and religious faiths of local people that takes a lot of effort but is quite indispensable."Understanding local people's culture and lifestyles helps the program run more smoothly. By the end of December 2012 more than 400,000 students and 10,900 adults had benefited from the program."Under the poor medical circumstances, the first thing people can do is to strengthen their physical health by themselves. Education is what helps to make this happen," said Yang.Providing medical training about infectious diseases to doctors is another aspect of the Health Express program, also known as the Spring Rain project.