Msa Mliva Ahamada did not expect he would go to China, learn medicine there and have become Comoran national director of public health.

Ahamada and 36 other Comoran high school graduates took an exam in 1982 to compete for the three scholarships provided by the Chinese government to study in China.

"I was given the scholarship with the highest score," said Ahamada, who, together with two others, are the first group of Comoran students the Chinese government have sponsored.

Ahamada never learned Chinese language before his Chinese experience started in the Chinese capital Beijing in the autumn of 1982.

"I could move around the city on my own in two and three months, " he said.

After learning the language for two years, he went to Guangzhou in south China to learn Chinese medicine.

He studied at the Guangzhou College of Traditional Chinese Medicine for five years, focusing on acupuncture, before he returned to his country, located in the Indian Ocean between Mozambique and Madagascar.

He went back to China again in September 1992 to study neuro medicine at Zhongshan Medical Sciences University for three years.

"My China experience helps me serve my people better," said Ahamada.

He began to work in Maarouf Hospital, the biggest hospital of Comoros, as an ordinary doctor, after he finished study at Zhongshan. Later he was elected into the hospital's council of doctors and nurses and at last became director of the hospital. In 2000, he was appointed as Comoran national director of public health.

The first thing he did after he became a government official was making an assessment on the country's health situation.

After he found that in Anjouan, one of Comoros' islands, only 39 percent of children had been vaccinated, he organized a meeting of countries and international institutions to ask for financial support for launching a vaccination campaign on the island.

"The campaign started on February 18, 2001, the day after a national reconciliation agreement was reached. Now more than 80 percent of children in Anjouan have been vaccinated," said Ahamada.

The 45-year-old director is making efforts to keep the HIV/AIDS prevalence rate, which currently stands at 0.12 percent, under 1 percent.

The country will introduce sex education in primary schools and middle schools and try to set up one more AIDS test station in each of the trio islands of Grand Comores, Anjouan and Moheli.

The mother/infant mortality rate was brought down to 381 per 100,000 last year from the 517 per 100,000 before Ahamada took office.

"Our goal is to reduce the rate to 150 per 100,000 by 2010," he said.

Ahamada wished that Comoros would remain stable after the newly- elected president Ahmed Abdallah Mohamed Sambi was sworn in on May 26.

He believed that, with a national health policy formatted under his leadership and continuous international support, the health situation in his country will gradually improve.

Source: Xinhua