Featured series 
Tag: HIV/AIDS
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Nation & World
Attacking the ties that bind poverty, illness
Jim Yong Kim remembers the drive home from the airport with his father, a dentist in the small Iowa city where Kim was raised. His dad asked Kim, who was on a break from Brown University, what he’d decided to study.
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Nation & World
Confronting tuberculosis
In the shadow of a hill where lepers once lived, a tuberculosis hospital designed for those infected with deadly, drug-resistant strains of the disease is giving hope to a new generation of medical pariahs in the tiny African nation of Lesotho.
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Nation & World
After years of talk, time for action
It was a tough assessment for a health clinic, and Jim Yong Kim was standing in the middle of one when he made it. “A lot of these are known as places where you go to die.”
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Nation & World
A pandemic’s front lines
Jim Yong Kim walked out of the small cinder block room where an underweight boy of 5 lay, his heart rate down to 115 from the dangerous 150 beats per minute at which it had been racing moments earlier. Kim stripped rubber gloves from his hands. “That was incredibly gutsy,” he said flatly…
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Nation & World
Shelter amid a health care storm
South Africa’s Valley of 1,000 Hills is a broad and breathtaking natural contradiction, an enormous valley whose floor is crowded with hills large and small, as if nature wasn’t quite sure what it was making.
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Nation & World
Fighting AIDS now and in the future
In the heart of the South African AIDS epidemic, at a medical school named for the nation’s legendary anti-apartheid leader, a fight against a different sort of oppression is being waged.
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Health
HSPH student takes aim at AIDS with statistics
Bethany Hedt has always been in love with numbers. Her challenge has been finding a way to feed that love while fulfilling an equally strong drive to help the people around her.
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Nation & World
Students see AIDS up close
While her classmates in Cambridge were shivering through a New England February, Sandy Bolm was sweltering in the heat of a Botswana summer, staring her future in the face in the labs of the Botswana-Harvard Partnership.
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Nation & World
AIDS: Finding answers
Ampheletse Medupe’s headaches just wouldn’t go away. Living in her small, neat home outside the African nation of Botswana’s capital, the mother of four kept on as best she could until sores broke out on her face.
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Nation & World
AIDS and hope
The man and woman grin down from the large billboard overlooking the road to the hospital in Mochudi, a small town outside Botswana’s capital of Gaborone.
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Health
Research reveals workings of anti-HIV drugs
Using ingenious molecular espionage, scientists have found how a single key enzyme, seemingly the Swiss Army knife in HIV’s toolbox, differentiates and dynamically binds both DNA and RNA as part of the virus’s fierce attack on host cells. The work is described this week (May 7) in the journal Nature.
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Health
Paul Farmer: One patient at a time
Paul Farmer remembers his patients and the lessons they’ve taught him, even the hard ones.
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Nation & World
South Africa: Edendale Hospital
On a hill in South Africa’s KwaZulu Natal province, near the hall where Nelson Mandela delivered his last speech before prison and the station where Mahatma Gandhi was tossed off a train to begin his life’s work, stands Edendale Hospital.
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Arts & Culture
South Africa’s ‘ace’
There are a thousand new HIV infections a day in South Africa, Pieter-Dirk Uys told an audience at Zero Arrow Theatre this week (April 14), during a public conversation sponsored by the Humanities Center at Harvard.
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Health
Genetics key in new knowledge about complex diseases
Genetic researchers crossed a critical threshold last year in their ability to understand complex diseases, posting a number of new discoveries that advanced knowledge of ailments caused by small contributions from multiple genes, the environment, and other causes.
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Health
Haiti clinic makes real gains
“13 October 2003.” Saintyl Louistess remembered the exact date she found out she had AIDS.
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Health
Louise Ivers: A higher purpose
It was January 2008 and the baby – the youngest of four children – had been brought into the clinic Ivers heads at Boucan Carré, Haiti, after a period of vomiting and not eating well.
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Health
Increasing U.S. support could save a million South Africans by 2012
More that 1.2 million deaths could be prevented in South Africa over the next five years by accelerating efforts to provide access to antiretroviral therapy (ART), according to a study released March 13 in the Journal of Infectious Diseases.
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Nation & World
Haiti: Maternal mortality
A serious lack of healthcare infrastructure and an absence of reliable transportation leave Haitian women with few places to safely give birth.
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Nation & World
Haiti: Dr. Louise, a higher purpose
An assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and infectious disease specialist at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Louise Ivers works through the nonprofit organization Partners In Health.
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Nation & World
Haiti: Malnutrition
In Haiti, malnutrition is the most serious threat to pediatric health.
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Health
MGH receives Gates Foundation grant
The Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) has received a five-year, $20.5 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to expand an international program investigating the biological factors underlying immune system control of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. The grant provides support to the International HIV Controllers Study, which currently involves researchers from more…
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Health
HSPH establishes new three-year grant program
The Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) has announced the establishment of the A.G. Leventis Foundation Fellowship Program with a three-year grant to support Cypriot/Greek and Nigerian students and scholars in public health.
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Health
Web technology allows health experts from around globe to kibitz
It was close to midnight one day this week in Durban, South Africa, when Harvard AIDS researcher Bruce D. Walker switched on his computer and made a visit to 104 Mt. Auburn St. in Cambridge.
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Health
Research in brief
Major differences in protocols used to determine brain death; Harvard researchers achieve stem cell milestone; Consortium links chromosome abnormality to autism disorders; Blocking HIV infection; Oral osteoporosis meds appear to reduce the risk of jaw degradation; Six new genetic variants linked to heart-disease risk factor; Gene variation may elevate risk of liver tumor in some…
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Health
Increasing growth hormone release reduces abdominal fat
Treatment with an investigational drug that induces the release of growth hormone significantly improved the symptoms of HIV lipodystrophy, a condition involving redistribution of fat and other metabolic changes in patients receiving combination drug therapy for HIV infection.
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Health
Second pathway behind HIV-associated immune system dysfunction is discovered
Researchers at the Partners AIDS Research Center (PARC) at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) may have discovered a second molecular “switch” responsible for turning off the immune system’s response against HIV. Last year, members of the same team identified a molecule called PD-1 that suppresses the activity of HIV-specific CD8 T cells that should destroy virus-infected…
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Health
Children forgotten part of AIDS picture
The forgotten faces of the AIDS epidemic belong to children: infected, neglected, and orphaned by a disease that ravages not only their bodies, but also their families and communities, according to a gathering of international AIDS experts Monday (Sept. 24).