THE WAR HERO IN THE FIGHT AGAINST CANCER
Chinese epidemiologist Qiao Youlin talks about how he went from being an aspiring cavalry soldier to becoming a medical professional lauded for his contributions to society, Wen Chihua from China Features reports.
Inspired by the tales of the Russian Cossack cavalry depicted in Mikhail Sholokhov’s epic novel And Quiet Flows the Don, Qiao Youlin grew up wanting to be soldier fighting for a noble cause.
Today, Qiao is widely considered a hero in his field, though he wields not rifles or pistols, but test tubes and petri dishes.
A renowned epidemiologist who holds a PhD from Johns Hopkins University in the United States, Qiao and his team have spent 15 years developing careHPV, a fast, inexpensive and more easily accessible test to detect human papillomavirus (HPV), a virus directly related to cervical cancer, the second most common type of cancer for women globally.
Supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Qiao’s team published their findings in the Londonbased medical journal The Lancet
Oncology on Sept 22, 2008. According to the journal entry, the test “can identify 14 strains of HPV including HPV 16 and 18 in about 2.5 hours, with the result as accurate as Hybrid Capture 2 (hc2), another advanced testing technology for cervical cancer generally applied in developed countries.”
In July 2018, careHPV was approved by the World Health Organization for use in cervical cancer screening.
“His research has led to the creation of careHPV, which will benefit numerous women in China as well as other developing countries,” says Li Yinuo, the director of the China Office of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Presently, 85 percent of all cervical cancer patients come from developing countries.
The son of a war veteran who fought for the liberation of Sichuan’s capital city Chengdu during the civil war in 1949, Qiao still recalls how his father would encourage him and his five siblings to help others.
While Qiao did attempt to pursue his childhood ambition — he applied to join the cavalry based in the Inner Mongolian autonomous region — he was rejected because of his myopia.
He later decided to join the public health service following the death of a classmate in the summer of 1972.
Qiao recalls that he was in the midst of a swimming class in a reservoir near his high school in Changshou county, Sichuan province, when one of his classmates disappeared under the water.
Though Qiao and four other students managed to bring him ashore, the classmate eventually died because no one knew how to perform artificial respiration. A farmer even told them to place the student on a water buffalo’s back and push the water out of his stomach.
“How ignorant! He had suffocated, not inhaled water,” Qiao says. “Back then they didn’t even have an ambulance in the countryside. We hitchhiked a ride on a truck carrying coal and rushed him to the county hospital but it was too late.
“He didn’t have to die. If just one person knew how to perform artificial respiration he might have made it.”
Because of the incident, Qiao was determined to study medicine. He decided to focus on epidemiology because he believes that public health prevention is the most effective way to save people, and that it can shape policy decisions by identifying risk factors for disease and targets for preventive healthcare.
In 1990, seven years after he earned his master’s degree in medicine from Dalian Medical College, he went to the US to study public health at Johns Hopkins University where he received a doctoral degree in 1996.
In 1997, Qiao left a promising career at the National Institutes of Health in the US, returning to China to do cancer epidemiology and prevention research.
As a scientist in public health, Qiao knows that a country should have a clear map of what causes certain kinds of cancer in order to keep the disease under control. All China had back then was a cancer chart made in the 1980s, leaving it far behind the rest of the world in cancer prevention.
“Coming home to work offered me a chance to greatly improve China’s cancer prevention,” he said.
Over the past 20 years, Qiao and his team have conducted numerous investigations on cancer epidemiology and created the country’s first map of attributable causes of cancer in China.
In 2017, based on his team’s eightyear clinical trials, two preventive vaccines against cervical cancers — US-made Gardasil and UK-made Cervarix — became available in China.
He has also been urging the Chinese government to follow Australia’s initiative of offering free HPV vaccines to girls aged 12 to 13 and catch-up programs for women under 26, which have proved effective in the prevention of cervical cancer.
“It’s reasonable to say that the vast majority of Chinese women would still not be able to access the vaccine if not for the efforts of Qiao and his team,” says Wu Yanping, a former colleague of Qiao.
Due to his contributions to exploring cervical cancer screening methods suitable for the lowresource countries, Qiao was conferred the 2011 IARC Medal of Honor by the World Health Organization and the 2018 Pearline Global Cancer Research Humanitarian Award by the US National Cancer Institute/National Institutes of Health.
“Qiao is a man who has the country and people in his heart,” says Zhang Xi, a student of Qiao who now works at the Peking University Cancer Hospital.
“I’m proud to have been his student. I want to be a scientist like him.”
“His research has led to the creation of careHPV, which will benefit numerous women in China as well as other developing countries.”
Li Yinuo director of the China Office of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation