This is an older article, but I thought it would be ideal for starting a discussion about community based approaches to infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS and Tuberculosis. As this article illustrates, when communities such as Cange (Kanj) or Thomonde (Tomond) organize and mobilize against infectious disease, the results can be both impressive and inspiring.  

As you read this, Haitian health care providers are in Africa training Rwandan doctors and nurses in the development of community based approaches to HIV/AIDS and Tuberculosis. Thus, the success of one organization has resulted in numerous partnerships, in Haiti and abroad, that have reached countless individuals and communities. There are public health successes in Haiti, and Haiti Innovation seeks to ensure that there will be many more.

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In the Vanguard Fighting AIDS, an Army of Haitian Villagers

November 29, 2003

By CELIA W. DUGGER

CANGE, Haiti - In the cool mist of daybreak, hundreds of villagers fanned out across the forsaken reaches of this nation's remote interior, fording rivers swollen by torrential rains, slogging through muddy cornfields and clambering up slippery mountainsides to reach people sickened by AIDS. At each home, they handed out the little white pills that have brought their neighbors, wasted by the disease, back to robust life.

"If the medicines weren't here, I'd be dead," said Manesse Gracia, 39, a mother of six who was plump in a workday dress the color of orange sherbet. "My children would live in destitution. My husband is a farmer, but the earth gives back nothing." Mrs. Gracia is part of a pioneering program run here by a Boston-based nonprofit group, Partners in Health, that has become an influential model in the frenetic race to expand drug treatment in dozens of poor countries across Africa, Asia and the Caribbean.

See our projects in: HIV/AIDS Prevention and Health

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http://tinyurl.com/9fopf

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