Kenya: Researchers Descend on AIDS-Ravaged City

The United States is building a new children's hospital with a sophisticated blood lab in Kisumu, Kenya's third-largest city. Home to the Luo tribe, Kisumu has an adult HIV infection rate of 22 percent, the highest in the country. Tuberculosis and malaria rates are among the highest in the world, with more TB in Nyanza province than in all the United States.

Kisumu residents' poor health makes the city a magnet for Western researchers. Last Thursday, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson dedicated a new, $6.4 million field laboratory nine miles outside Kisumu. CDC will operate the lab, the largest of its kind in Africa.

"This is clearly an investment that is going to pay off over and over again for global health," said CDC Director Dr. Julie Gerberding, who joined Thompson and other Bush administration health care officials who toured four nations in Africa hit hard by AIDS.

Some patients at Kisumu General Hospital may soon benefit from low-cost antiviral drugs, part of a wave of $39.6 million in assistance from wealthy nations through the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria. Currently at Kisumu's daytime clinic, only 36 of the 1,200 patients who need HIV drugs can get them. Once the Global Fund-subsidized drugs reach the clinic, patients will be able to obtain drugs for $25 a month, still a high price in a country with a per capita income of less than $300 a year. In rural areas surrounding Kisumu, annual incomes are around $50.

Dr. Jonathan Mermin, director of CDC's office in Uganda, said African communities that worried about getting HIV drugs at all are now questioning how to choose equitably who will get them and who will not.

Back to other news for December 10, 2003