Marni von Wilpert’s Uncommon Path After graduating from Berkeley in 2005, Marni von Wilpert left California to serve as a social worker in the Peace Corps. She was sent to Mokubilo, a rural village in eastern Botswana. There, she provided services for babies born with HIV and children who had lost one or both parents to AIDS. She also helped with education, treatment, and care for HIV-positive adults. “I witnessed…
Continue reading “Confronting Discrimination from Mokubilo to Jackson”
By Martha Henry The AIDS epidemic has had a devastating impact on child survival in sub-Saharan Africa. In Botswana, under-five mortality almost doubled from 1990 to 2000. Since then, remarkable progress has been made to prevent pregnant HIV-positive mothers from passing the virus to their infants, either in utero or through breastfeeding. Yet in a study published this July in BMC Pediatrics, Harvard AIDS Initiative (HAI) researchers found that HIV-exposed…
Continue reading “HIV-Exposure and Infant Mortality in Botswana”
For almost 30 years, Dr. Richard Marlink helped shape the work of the Harvard AIDS Initiative (HAI). As he leaves to create and lead the Rutgers Global Health Institute, we—his colleagues at HAI— created a short video to express our appreciation of his work and gratitude for his friendship.
By Martha Henry Because of his own history, Dr. Mompati Mmalane had ideas about how best to introduce a complex clinical trial to communities like Shakawe, a remote village in northwestern Botswana. HIV is no stranger to rural villages. Although the national adult prevalence is 24%, the rate is much higher in some villages. Older adults remember the days before antiretroviral treatment (ART), when Saturdays were crowded with funerals for…
Continue reading “It Takes 30 Villages: Building Trust in a Clinical Trial”
From: Scott Dryden-Peterson Sent: Friday, June 19, 2015 Subject: BCPP milestone Today we completed mapping of the last study community. In one of the many remarkable behind-the-scenes contributions that has made a project of this scale possible, during nights and weekends over the past 18 months, Oaitse (cc’d here) single-handedly identified and labeled ~73,700 households from Ranaka to Shakawe. We are indebted to you, Oaitse. Thanks, Scott
By Martha Henry It’s unlikely that you’ll ever meet anyone more focused than Max Essex. A 1986 New York Times profile described him as “mild mannered” with “a thatch of thick hair” and “among those in the forefront of the worldwide effort to find a cure for acquired immune deficiency syndrome.” Today, though his hair is white, that description still fits. Essex, now in his 70s, still arrives at the…
By Martha Henry The end of AIDS as a public health threat may not come from an effective vaccine, as many had hoped for decades, but from a collaborative effort across nations to prevent new HIV infections. The epidemic that spread mainly through sexual connections may be subdued not from a single breakthrough, but through long-term transnational collaborations.
By Elliot Eton (Eton spent a gap year working with HAI in Boston and Botswana. He’s now a freshman at Harvard. This article originally appeared in the Fall 2015 issue of Harvard Science Review.) The target is 2030. The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) has ambitiously set 2030 as the year by which we should achieve the end of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, which has claimed the lives of 39…
Continue reading “Updates on Efforts to Combat the HIV/AIDS Pandemic”
Missed the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) in Boston, February 22-25, 2016? No worries. You can still view videos of major HAI/BHP presentations and press conferences.
The role bacteria play in human health—what’s termed our microbiome—has been much in the news lately. Each person is host to a unique assortment and concentration of over 100 trillion bacterial cells, most of which are beneficial. For example, the bacteria in our gut help us digest food and produce some of the vitamins we require. They also have a strong influence on everything from mental health to the…
Continue reading “The Microbiome’s Role in an Infant’s Developing Immune System”
