Post Tagged with: "therapy"

Leave it to the Experts: Innovative HIV Programs in Malawi

We’ve reached a global hinge point in the treatment of HIV.  People living with the disease are no longer passive beneficiaries.  After more than a decade of receiving health and nutrition training, HIV+ people are often times living healthier lifestyles than many of their negative peers.  Catholic Relief Services‘ Expert Client program places trained HIV+ community members in local health facilities where they guide new patients through the rigors of anti-retroviral treatment (ARV).  By using their own experience of living with the disease to counsel and mentor, they empower the new patients to live more healthy and productive lives.  I recently shot and produced this video for CRS in southern Malawi.  The program is funded by USAID.

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Magic in the Numbers

Not many of us can claim to have saved 100,000 lives. I recently spent a week in Rwanda photographing jointly for the Gates Foundation and the Global Fund, two of the greatest change-makers in global health today. The Gates Foundation is a major contributor to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Malaria and Tuberculosis. Together they save an estimated 100,000 lives each month. Above, a child receives a polio vaccine in a public health center in Kabuga, Rwanda. While health care is a controversial issue across the world, especially in US politics, we in the West might view it differently if were we dealing with the same epidemics people face in places like Sub-Saharan Africa. Here, UN, PEPFAR or Global Fund-supported public health centers are the primary means for accessing care for diseases such as tuberculosis and HIV. Treatment for such diseases would be far out of reach for most[…]

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In Gertrude’s STEPS – Catholic Relief Services work with OVCs in Zambia

It can be said that young people have suffered the most from the effects of HIV in Africa. The disease took a devastating toll on the population of Zambia, wiping out nearly a generation of the most economically active and productive members of society, those 20 to 40 years old. But it is the young who are left behind, often to fend for themselves and cope with a disease that is to be their only inheritance. With an HIV prevalence rate of 20%, Mongu District in western Zambia is one of the areas hardest hit by HIV in the country. Below, Nurse Idah Jangazya collects blood samples during a monthly HIV screening clinic at Mindolo Clinic in Kitwe, Zambia. Gertrude Nyambe is a 41 year-old mother of five living in Mongu. At the age of 35 she and her husband were diagnosed with HIV. He succumbed to the disease soon[…]

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