(A CD4 count in an uninfected, healthy person is between 500 and 1,600.) Plus, many were malnourished, suffering from other opportunistic infections like tuberculosis and living on less than $1 a day. Among the participants, the median CD4 count-which measures the number of white blood cells that protect the body from infection-was 131. More than half of the patients in the program already had full-blown AIDS by the time they started taking antiretrovirals.
“These people have gone from certain death to actually leading a fairly normal life.” Jean Pape (MD ’75), the Holtzmann Professor of Clinical Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine, who has directed GHESKIO since its founding in 1982. “It’s had a Lazarus effect,” says co-author Dr. The program has proved highly successful: in a study published last year in the New England Journal of Medicine, investigators at GHESKIO and Weill Cornell Medicine reported that more than two-thirds of the initial 1,000 patients enrolled were still alive a decade later, about the same survival rate as their counterparts in the United States. Over the next year, more than 1,000 adults began antiretroviral therapy, a combination of drugs that suppresses the virus and reduces the risk of transmission-and they were among the first to receive such lifesaving medication in a developing nation.
#Lazarus syndrome free#
But in early 2003, the Haitian Study Group on Kaposi’s Sarcoma and Opportunistic Infections-a nonprofit known as GHESKIO (its French acronym) that provides AIDS care and other services throughout the country in partnership with Haiti’s Ministry of Health and the Weill Cornell Medicine Center for Global Health-obtained funding from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria to start a free treatment program for those with the illness. Back when these patients were first diagnosed, HIV-fighting drugs weren’t available in the impoverished country, so doctors expected many to die within 12 months. Years ago, all that would have been nearly impossible for most Haitians with AIDS. And yet another shared plans to take a pharmacology class, with the dream of opening a drugstore one day. Another rejoiced at being able to celebrate her grandchild’s First Holy Communion. Among the survivors was a mother who spoke proudly of living to see her daughter attend university. At what is thought to be the world’s oldest HIV/AIDS clinic, based in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, clinicians recently interviewed some longtime patients with the disease-one that’s all too common in the Caribbean nation, which has the highest infection rate in the Western Hemisphere.
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