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Xinjiang sits at the crossroads of ancient trade routes like the old silk road which bore caravans of silk and spices to central Asia. Now juggernauts shuttle across from Pakistan and Afghanistan, and north from the Golden Triangle bearing a modern commodity - heroin, and with it deadly disease - Aids.

Many of Xinjiang's drug users are ethnic Uighurs. Unemployed and poverty stricken, they take drugs because they fear they have no future. And now Aids is cutting a swathe through this community.

Tests in government detoxification centres indicate around 70% of intravenous drug users to be HIV positive.

Even some medical professionals are badly informed. In one backstreet clinic, a Uighur doctor told me: "There's no Aids in Xinjiang. None at all."

When I asked him what the symptoms were, he said: "Headache, heart pain, it's like having a cold."

His ignorance was shocking, but hardly surprisingly. Medical students here only get two hours of lessons about Aids.

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