December 1 was World AIDS Day, but for a group of present and former UCSF pediatrics residents, every day is World AIDS Day.
They are members of an elite group of American pediatricians who are addressing, through the Baylor AIDS Corps, the effects of AIDS on African children.
The corps, a project of the
Baylor College of Medicine, aims to increase the number of pediatricians available to care for AIDS-infected children in sub-Saharan Africa. The program recently was featured in an article in
Time magazine.
The prestigious and selective program has about 50 participants. Five of them are from UCSF. Of only 10 slots available for 2007, three have been awarded to UCSF pediatrics residents: Christopher Buck, MD, Janell Routh, MD, and Kevin Clarke, MD.
"It is truly a unique opportunity for recent pediatric residency graduates to practice clinical medicine in sub-Saharan Africa, a region with a severe shortage of health care providers facing a huge crisis in pediatric HIV/AIDS," Clarke said.
For Clarke, this will not be his first experience working in Africa. During a break from medical school at the University of Connecticut, Clarke worked on an HIV research project in Lusaka, Zambia. The experience motivated him to help found a nonprofit organization, Friends of Zambian Orphans, or
FOZO, to help children orphaned by the epidemic.
Clarke said that the UCSF Department of Pediatrics also supported his return to Zambia this past spring to consult on establishing a clinic to care for victims of child sexual abuse.
"The Pediatric AIDS Corps is a progressive model demonstrating that young physicians can serve effectively in delivering care abroad in HIV/AIDS while supporting local training initiatives to enhance sustainability," he said.
Clarke, Buck and Routh will join current corps members Eileen Birmingham, MD, and Ryan Phelps, MD, both of whom are treating children with AIDS in Swaziland as part of an effort to boost the number of doctors in six "high-prevalence countries."
'Dying Without Treatment'
Phelps and Birmingham are two of 13 physicians currently working at the Baylor Children's Clinical Center of Excellence (COE) outpatient clinic in Mbabane, Swaziland, examining and treating children with HIV and their adult caretakers. The AIDS corps also sponsors physicians working in Botswana, Burkina Faso, Lesotho, Malawi and Uganda.
Phelps, from Denison, Texas, also has been blogging from Mbabane on the seemingly insurmountable task of fighting an epidemic that has infected nearly one-quarter of Swaziland's population of 1 million people, and on what to do about the 70,000 orphans the epidemic has created. By 2010, that number is expected to nearly double to around 120,000 - 120,000 children without adult caregivers.
The
blog also is sprinkled with unexpected and sometimes amusing cross-cultural observations, like the evidently fruitless effort to find an ostrich for a Swazi Thanksgiving dinner meal.
"Swaziland is believed to have the highest prevalence of HIV in the world," Phelps said via email from Mbabane. In the months ahead, Phelps said, he and Birmingham also will reach out to assist the rural health centers with HIV treatment and prevention, especially mother-to-child transmission.
"Until very recently, African children were simply dying without treatment, despite decades of experience with antiretroviral medications in other parts of the world. We are bringing those medicines to the part of the world that needs them most, at long last," Phelps said.
"As a result, we will give children the opportunity to live to be adults. Children with HIV are collateral victims, as they are almost all infected with the virus during childbirth or early breastfeeding. Being able to provide them lifesaving treatment on the front lines of this devastating epidemic makes me very proud to be a doctor."
