The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has landed in China with some heavy duty personnel including Dr. Ray Yip a former Director of the China office of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Foundation is now working out terms of the partnership with the Chinese government.

“For some time we have been exploring opportunities to help support the response to HIV/AIDS in China. We have not reached any final decisions about new funding,” said Jenny Sorensen, a foundation spokesperson. “We’re delighted that Dr. Ray Yip, a distinguished AIDS expert, will be joining the Gates Foundation in July to help lead our work in China.”

The U.S. press, however, remains skeptical since the Foundation faces “major challenges in a country where many non-governmental organizations are mistrusted, and the country’s top AIDS activists are routinely put under house arrest.” But as I have written before, and without being naive, there is a lot more that is positive going on in this effort than may be implied in the headlines.

Bates Gill, a China scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington,D.C., wrote in a recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine, that there are a number of problems to be overcome in mounting a nationwide HIV prevention effort, but

“International health experts remain cautiously hopeful about China’s chances of controlling its epidemic. Success, however, will depend on how well the government handles challenges such as overcoming stigma, mounting aggressive outreach efforts for high-risk groups, and mobilizing funding, expertise, and commitment throughout the vast and diverse country to identify, counsel, and care for the people who are infected. Although a political corner has been turned in Beijing, there is still an enormous amount of work to be done on the ground.”

And it is precisely in these areas that the Gates Foundation can make an enormous contribution.