From Haiti, a surprise: good news about AIDS

Gringo

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Jan 1, 2002
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From Haiti, a surprise: good news about AIDS
AP - Sunday, July 05, 2009 7:07:53 PM
By JONATHAN M. KATZ
From Haiti, a surprise: good news about AIDS
AP

When Micheline Leon was diagnosed with HIV, her parents told her they would fit her for a coffin.

Fifteen years later, she walks around her two-room concrete house on Haiti's central plateau, watching her four children play under the plantain trees. She looks healthy, her belly amply filling a gray, secondhand T-shirt. Her three sons and one daughter were born after she was diagnosed. None has the virus.

"I'm not sick," she explained patiently on a recent afternoon. "People call me sick but I'm not. I'm infected."

In many ways the 35-year-old mother's story is Haiti's too. In the early 1980s, when the strange and terrifying disease showed up in the U.S. among migrants who had escaped Haiti's dictatorship, experts thought it could wipe out a third of the country's population.

Instead, Haiti's HIV infection rate stayed in the single digits, then plummeted.

In a wide range of interviews with doctors, patients, public health experts and others, The Associated Press found that Haiti's success in the face of chronic political and social turmoil came because organizations cooperated and tailored programs to the country's specific challenges.

Much of the credit went to two pioneering nonprofit groups, Boston-based Partners in Health and Port-au-Prince's GHESKIO, widely considered to be the world's oldest AIDS clinic.

"The Haitian AIDS community feels like they're out in front of everyone else on this, and pretty much they are," said Judith Timyan, senior HIV/AIDS adviser for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Haiti. "They really do some of the best work in the world."

Researchers say the number of suffers was initially lessened by closing private blood banks, and statistically by high mortality rates -- an untreated AIDS sufferer in Haiti lives eight fewer years than an untreated American.

Well-coordinated use of AIDS drugs, education and behavioral changes such as increased condom use have kept the disease from surging back, at least for now.

Statistics are notoriously unreliable in this country of poverty and lack of infrastructure. The most telling data would be the number of new infections in a given year, but researchers say such a precise count is impossible.

Next best is to estimate the infected as a percentage of the population. From 1993 to 2003, only pregnant women were tested, and their rate of infection dropped from 6.2 percent to 3.1 percent, according to GHESKIO and national health surveys.
 

mountainannie

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Dec 11, 2003
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elizabetheames.blogspot.com
this is very old news but it is good to see jonathan katz reporting something positive from haiti,,,,, he made his mark with the mud cookie story... which was also very old news, since the mud contains bismuth and is used to control the diarrehea (no, I just can't get the spelling right) from the contaminated water, Haiti ran a HUGE and very public billboard and radio campaign on condom use.

Guess Bill had a little talk with him..... finally,...!