Haitians Find Ways to Limit the Spread of HIV/AIDS

Marie Lourdes Pierre, left, a patient with HIV/AIDS, sits at her house in central Haiti next to her "accompagnateur," Obner Saint Valain, a neighbor who helps her manage her regimen of medicines.

In the early 1980s, when the disease showed up in the United States among migrants who had escaped Haiti's dictatorship, experts thought it could wipe out a third of that country's population. Instead, Haiti's HIV infection rate stayed in the single digits, then plummeted.

Researchers say the infection rate was initially lessened by closing private blood banks; the statistics were also affected by high mortality rates: Since an untreated AIDS sufferer in impoverished Haiti dies eight years sooner than an untreated American, there are fewer AIDS patients to count. Well-coordinated use of drugs, education and behavioral changes such as increased condom use have kept the disease from surging back, at least for now.

Much of the credit has been given to two pioneering nonprofit groups, Boston-based Partners in Health and Port-au-Prince's GHESKIO, which operates what is widely considered to be the world's oldest AIDS clinic. Partners in Health's accompagnateur program, in which local workers are paid to help those who have recently received an HIV/AIDS diagnosis adhere to medication regimens and prevention measures, has been duplicated in Africa. So has GHESKIO's work, such as distributing phone cards to patients to enable them to keep in closer touch with their doctors.

Today, the official rate of infection in Haiti is 2.2 percent among people ages 15 to 49, according to UNAIDS, the United Nations program addressing the disease. That's still far higher than in the developed world, but it's lower than the Bahamas, Guyana and Suriname, and much lower than sub-Saharan Africa, where the rate averages about 5 percent but spikes to 24 percent in Botswana and 33 percent in Swaziland.

"The Haitian AIDS community feels like they're out in front of everyone else on this, and pretty much they are," said Judith Timyan, senior HIV/AIDS adviser for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Haiti. "They really do some of the best work in the world."

-- Associated Press