Working on the front lines of the anti-retroviral roll-out

Working on the front lines of the anti-retroviral roll-out

Speaker's Name: Janet Giddy, MBChB; Wendy Mphatswe, MBChB; Henry Sunpath, MBChBSpeaker's Affiliation: McCord HospitalLocation_Line 1: Room 227, Tosteson Medical Education Center (MEC),Location_Line 2: Harvard Medical School

Tuesday evening I attended the above seminar on Longwood Ave. Dr. Giddy described the work being done at a McCord Hospital in Durban South Africa. The current president of the Country does not believe that HIV causes AIDS and has been a problem in developing an effective AIDS program. This is in a country in which some areas have a 50% incidence of HIV infection. It is not that bad everywhere but bad. Things are coming around especially with money from President Bush’s HIV program. The new protease inhibitor drugs work and are available but pricy. One of the major problems is compliance in therapy or getting people to take their drugs and stay on the program. Also, reaching people outside the urban centers especially to enlist them in the program is difficult. Three visits and sophisticated testing is required to select the appropriate therapy and difficult choices must be made with regard to who can be treated effectively and who is too far gone to benefit. Treatment of pregnant HIV positive mothers can be very effective in reducing the mother to child transmission frequency.

I was impressed with the testing capabilities available at the McCord Hospital. They seem to be in close contact with people at Harvard and participating in a number of joint studies.