They call her Simba Jike, Swahili for Lioness. Africans love her for her warmth and respect her for her strictness.

Krisana Kraisintu, a 55 year-old Thai pharmacist known for her courage and tireless work in helping the global poor by bringing affordable generic AIDs and malaria drugs to help victims has been named as Reader’s Digest Asian of the Year for 2008.

Although international pharmaceutical companies began manufacturing effective AIDS drugs in the 1990s, they were so expensive that the Thai government couldn’t afford to provide them to poor patients. Only the rich could buy them. By the early part of this decade, more than 450,000 Thais had died of AIDS, partly due the lack of access to inexpensive medication.

But in 2002, thanks in large measure to Krisana Kraisintu, Thailand started mass producing inexpensive AIDS medicines. Death rates plummeted. Today, Thailand has one of the best public AIDS treatment programs in the developing world, with most poor patients getting free medicine.

Thais are not the only beneficiaries of Kraisintu’s vision and dedication – her drugs are used to treat poor patients in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam too. And she has devoted the last five years to helping Africans battle AIDS, and another major killer – malaria.

The Reader’s Digest Asian of The Year is selected by the editors of Reader’s Digest magazines in Asia as the person who best embodies the contemporary expression of Asia’s values and traditions.

Kraisintu will receive the prestigious award and a check for US$5000 at an official ceremony in Thailand.

"If you need any inspiration in 2008 to finally get around to that New Year’s resolution to help others more, then Kraisintu is the person to inspire you," says Jim Plouffe, editor-in-chief of the English-language edition in Asia. "

Kraisintu didn’t plan on a career in pharmacy. Passionately fond of the arts, she wanted to be a conductor.

As a child she was deeply influenced by her grandmother, a Buddhist nun. "She’d sit outside the house and buy all the wares of the vegetable vendors who went by so that they didn’t have to walk all the way to the market," Kraisintu says. "She often told me, ‘If you have the opportunity to do good, you should.’"

After getting her doctorate in the UK, she returned to Thailand in 1981. She taught pharmacology for three years then joined the publicly owned Government Pharmaceutical Organization (GPO). In 1989 Kraisintu was chosen to head its newly created research and development institute. She was 37.

A hard-driving, no-nonsense leader, she quickly developed inexpensive drugs for diseases ranging from hypertension to diabetes. Her medicines were cheap because they didn’t involve expensive basic research – they used the same key ingredients as those in drugs first created by Western multinationals. Making such drugs – known as generics – was legal since the patents on the originals had expired. Although not technically difficult, the process involves extensive research and testing.

In 1992, with AIDS spreading rapidly in Thailand, Kraisintu decided to make generic versions of AIDS drugs known as antiretrovirals (ARVs). She was especially interested in zidovu-dine, a drug that reduced the chances of pregnant HIV-positive women passing the virus to their children.

She immediately ran into opposition. Zidovudine, originally developed to combat cancer, is highly toxic, and Kraisintu’s colleagues didn’t want to work on it. "They felt I’d poison them," she recalls.

She knew that provided proper precautions were taken, handling the chemicals to make zidovudine was safe, so she worked alone. Wearing mask, gloves and goggles, she’d start at 5:30 a.m., seven days a week. For six months she analyzed drugs and experimented with formulations. Once her colleagues realized that she remained in good health, they began helping her.

In 1995, Kraisintu produced her first generic zidovudine capsules – at one-fifth the cost of the branded original. It was the developing world’s first generic ARV.

The combination pill had to be taken only twice daily – instead of other six-pills-a-day regimens – and it was 18 times cheaper. As a result, more than three-quarters of the 100,000 people being treated for AIDS in Thailand now take Kraisintu’s three-in-one cocktail.

In late 2002, Kraisintu received a call from the owners of a factory in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Many of their employes were dying of AIDS –could she make GPO-vir for them? Kraisintu, who had been eager to help African countries tackle their many health problems, immediately agreed.

She has also helped Tanzania produce a generic ARV and trained hospital staff in four West African countries to make artesunate suppositories, a treatment that she developed for children with severe malaria. In addition, she has helped turn a moribund pharmaceuticals factory in Mali into the first sub-Saharan facility to produce anti-malarial tablets on an industrial scale.

Kraisintu resigned from the GPO in 2002 and became an independent consultant. She comes from a wealthy family – one of her cousins owns five five-star hotels in Phuket – so she doesn’t charge for her services and sometimes even pays for her own expenses.

Krisana Kraisintu’s life achievements are featured in Reader’s Digest Asian editions in January 2008 to inspire readers across Asia.