#LAZARUS EFFECT FREE#

More than half of the patients in the program already had full-blown AIDS by the time they started taking antiretrovirals. вЂњThese people have gone from certain death to actually leading a fairly normal life.вЂќ Jean PapeВ (MD вЂ™75), the Holtzmann Professor of Clinical Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine, who has directed GHESKIO since its founding in 1982.

вЂњItвЂ™s had a Lazarus effect,вЂќ says co-author Dr. The program has proved highly successful: in a study published last year in the New England Journal of Medicine, investigators at GHESKIO and Weill Cornell Medicine reported that more than two-thirds of the initial 1,000 patients enrolled were still alive a decade later, about the same survival rate as their counterparts in the United States. Over the next year, more than 1,000 adults began antiretroviral therapy, a combination of drugs that suppresses the virus and reduces the risk of transmission-and they were among the first to receive such lifesaving medication in a developing nation.

#LAZARUS EFFECT FREE#

But in early 2003, the Haitian Study Group on KaposiвЂ™s Sarcoma and Opportunistic Infections-a nonprofit known as GHESKIOВ (its French acronym) that provides AIDS care and other services throughout the country in partnership with HaitiвЂ™s Ministry of Health and the Weill Cornell Medicine Center for Global Health-obtained funding from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria to start a free treatment program for those with the illness. Back when these patients were first diagnosed, HIV-fighting drugs werenвЂ™t available in the impoverished country, so doctors expected many to die within 12 months. Years ago, all that would have been nearly impossible for most Haitians with AIDS. And yet another shared plans to take a pharmacology class, with the dream of opening a drugstore one day. Another rejoiced at being able to celebrate her grandchildвЂ™s First Holy Communion. Among the survivors was a mother who spoke proudly of living to see her daughter attend university. At what is thought to be the worldвЂ™s oldest HIV/AIDS clinic, based in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, clinicians recently interviewed some longtime patients with the disease-one thatвЂ™s all too common in the Caribbean nation, which has the highest infection rate in the Western Hemisphere.