How one man won the fight against TB and Aids in Haiti

When former US president Bill Clinton asked his daughter Chelsea about Paul Farmer and the organisation he helped found, Partners In Health, she responded, “Oh, dad, he’s a saint. He’s our generation’s Albert Schweitzer.”

Dr Farmer would be the first to deny any claims to sainthood, and although he recently picked up a Hero Award from the US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, he would hardly describe himself as one.

However, Chelsea Clinton’s comparison with Schweitzer is not without merit.

Both were/are exceptionally dedicated medical doctors and accomplished authors.

Schweitzer, like Farmer today, worked for many years in sub-Saharan Africa.

Christianity has also played an important role in the motives of both men when it came to treating the poor.

Dr Farmer and his colleagues at Partners in Health made unprecedented progress and gained worldwide acclaim in treating tuberculosis and Aids in Haiti.

For about $150 to $200, one per cent of what it costs to treat a tuberculosis patient in the US, Partners in Health, relying on community health workers, stopped the spread of the disease in central Haiti in its tracks. Almost no one in the catchment area has died from TB since 1988.

By the late 1990s, the clinic had also reduced the transmission of HIV from infected mothers to their babies to 4 per cent, as low as the rate in the US at the time.

Partners in Health’s model of community health care, many observers believe, could be the model that can be replicated throughout the developing world.

Dr Farmer went to Haiti as a 22-year old college graduate.

He would spend a year travelling around the island and talking to ordinary Haitians about their health conditions and volunteering his services to various hospitals and clinics.

It was while working for a small charity called Eye Care Haiti, which conducted mobile outreach clinics in Haiti’s central plateau town of Mirebalais, that he met Ophelia Dahl, one of the founding directors of Partners in Health.

The two travelled around the central Plateau region going from village to village and house to house asking rural Haitians what they should do to help them; something that development agencies and NGOs are still failing to do in the least developed countries.

“They had a very clear idea of what they wanted,” says Dr Farmer. “They didn’t say, for example, that they wanted low-cost, high-yield programmes but that they wanted a hospital and quality health-care.”