Word: lesotho
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Americans aren't alone in their efforts. Dr. Edith Mohapi was born in Lesotho and left when she was 17 to pursue advanced studies and medical school. She returned last year to run the clinic in Maseru and was joined earlier this summer by her daughter Dr. Lineo Thahane, also a pediatrician and one of the first Pediatric AIDS Corps members. The nurses, social workers and other staff are also from Lesotho...
Kline's plan for dealing with the ongoing emergency in Africa was to create several pediatric centers of excellence for AIDS. (Four have opened--in Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi and Swaziland--and four more are in the planning stages.) Then he set about finding the staff and the money to run them. Since there aren't enough doctors and nurses in most African countries, that meant recruiting young physicians from the U.S. to spend a year or two at the clinics. Most of the funding for the first class of 52 doctors in his Pediatric AIDS Corps comes from Bristol-Myers...
...already see the difference in Lesotho, a tiny mountain kingdom of 2 million people surrounded by its much larger and richer neighbor, South Africa. At least 22,000 Basotho children are HIV positive, but as of two years ago, fewer than 20 were on ARVs, and there were only two doctors in the whole country looking after children with AIDS. In the year since the children's clinic opened on the outskirts of Maseru, 700 kids--including Bokang--have received treatment from 10 pediatricians...
What happens next in Lesotho and the rest of sub-Saharan Africa depends a lot on how broadly these first efforts expand. All the ARVs in the world aren't going to help much if children and their families don't have enough food to build up their strength or clean water to keep from picking up infections. Tough as it has been to focus attention on children with AIDS, it has been harder for clinics to get and use a common antibiotic to prevent pneumonia and other ills in HIV-positive children who don't yet need ARVs...
Some of the challenges go even deeper. "I did not realize how much women lack basic rights in this country," Dr. Julia Kim writes from Swaziland, north of Lesotho. Women traditionally turn over all their income to their husbands, she says, and defer to them on matters of treatment--a practice Kim struggled with when trying to convince one father that immediate care was needed for his daughter whose immune system had collapsed...