Pei Feng (a pseudonym) is an HIV/AIDS patient living in Guizhou Province. This past summer, his blog entry, "I Saw a Glimmer of Hope," reverberated through China's AIDS community. The post detailed his experiences with traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) in the treatment of his disease.

While his health hasn't deteriorated completely since 2008, when he first discovered he was HIV-positive, Pei Feng has suffered from bad colds, pharyngitis and tinnitus, all of which took him weeks to recover from. At the end of 2009, his CD4 count dropped to 245. (CD4 tests evaluate the immune system's response against HIV/AIDS. The normal count is 750; a person with a CD4 count of 200 or below is generally considered to have full-blown AIDS.) But six months after joining his city's free TCM treatment program in February, his CD4 count has risen to 327. Now, he seldom catches colds.

Though not all the HIV/AIDS sufferers who receive TCM therapies are as lucky as Pei Feng, the prospect of a TCM-based HIV/AIDS treatment has drawn attention worldwide.

December 1 marks the 23rd year of World AIDS Day. In anticipation, this past October more than 200 experts and doctors from around the world convened the First International TCM-based HIV/AIDS Prevention and Treatment Conference in Beijing to discuss and exchange new ideas on how to combat HIV/AIDS with TCM.

The global situation

In 1981, doctors witnessed the beginnings of the AIDS disaster when the first cases of Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) began to emerge. HIV-related deaths climbed at an alarming rate. Over the past three decades, more than 60 million people have been infected with HIV and 25 million have died, according to 2009 statistics published by the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS).

China's situation is not encouraging. By the end of 2009, a total of 740,000 people were reported as infected with the disease, including 105,000 HIV/AIDS patients, and reported deaths were about 50,000, according to a joint evaluation by China's Ministry of Health (MOH), UNAIDS and the World Health Organization (WHO).

In face of the epidemic, researchers worldwide have been relentless in their efforts to develop drugs and, hopefully, a vaccine to combat HIV/AIDS.

Highly Active Anti-retroviral Therapy (HAART), also known as cocktail therapy, is generally considered the most effective way to fight HIV/AIDS. But because of its high cost, many of the afflicted cannot afford to receive the treatment. Moreover, the therapy is ineffective in one 10th of patients due to drug resistance and other factors.

An AIDS vaccine would be an extremely effective method for prevention and control, but there have been few major breakthroughs in vaccine research and development globally in the last 30 years. Dozens of clinical trials have failed. Some scientists feel that the search for an AIDS vaccine is a dead end.