Page 35 - The Power to Change Anything

24 INFLUENCER

In 1988, King Rama IX of Thailand turned 60. To honor
the event, he gave the country a gift. Unfortunately, the king’s
well-intended present actually unleashed a horrendous plague
on his people. Prior to the king’s birthday, AIDS in Thailand
had been restricted to prisoners who passed the disease from
one to the other by sharing used needles. For several years the
disease stayed incarcerated with its hosts. But in 1988, in a
birthday-inspired act of compassion (in keeping with a national
tradition for momentous occasions), the king granted amnesty
to over 30,000 prisoners. Released from its confinement, the
AIDS virus celebrated its new freedom by rampaging through
a much larger intravenous drug-user community. In just a few
months almost half the users nationwide were infected.
The country’s infectious disease experts watched in horror
as month by month the disease spread from one community to
another. Close on the heels of IV drug users, sex workers fell
prey. Within only a year, as many as one-third of the sex work-
ers in some provinces tested HIV positive. Next, married men
carried the scourge home to their unsuspecting wives, who fre-
quently passed it to newborn babies. By 1993 an estimated
1 million Thais were infected with HIV. Health experts world-
wide predicted that in just a few years Thailand would lead the
world in infections per capita—with as many as one in four
adults carrying the virus.
But it never happened. Within two years the virus hit a wall,
and then it retreated. By the late 1990s—largely because of a
remarkable influence strategy implemented by Dr. Wiwat—
new infections had been cut by 80 percent. The Thai govern-
ment estimates that as of 2004, over 5 million people who
should have been infected weren’t.
But the solution didn’t come easily, and it certainly didn’t
come after the first attempt. While AIDS was taking Thailand
by storm, Dr. Wiwat battled the plague alongside a handful of
his colleagues in the Ratchaburi province. His training had
taught him that the key to fighting the spread of any disease