Bikers congregate in front of the graffitti-splashed wall of the GHESKIO center across the street from one of the poorest slums in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Photo by Jonathan Rodgers
Vanderbilt researchers help in Haitian AIDS effort
AIDS researchers pose in front of the GHESKIO center in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
Back row, left to right: Drs. Warren Johnson Jr., chief of the Division of International Medicine and Infectious Diseases at the Weill Cornell Medical College; Jean Pape; Barney Graham; and David Haas. Front row, left to right: Drs. Greg Wilson, assistant professor of Pediatrics, Vanderbilt; Marie Marcelle Deschamps, GHESKIO; John Ho, Cornell; Spyros Kalams, associate professor of Medicine, Vanderbilt; Becca Dillingham, University of Virginia; and Peter Wright. Photo by Jonathan Rodgers
AIDS research at Vanderbilt University Medical Center is gaining an increasingly international focus.
Since the early 1990s, Dr. Peter Wright, chief of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Division and co-principal investigator of the Vanderbilt HIV Vaccine Program, has participated in efforts to develop AIDS treatment and research programs in Haiti.
The pace of Vanderbilt’s involvement is accelerating. Last month, seven Vanderbilt researchers flew to Port-au-Prince to meet with their Haitian colleagues and researchers from the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, which has been assisting health care providers there since the early 1980s.
An account of the trip will be published next month in Lens magazine, VUMC’s research publication.
Haiti — currently wracked with violent attempts by rebels to overthrow the government — is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. It also has the highest rate of infection by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) on this side of the globe. Yet Haiti’s AIDS burden has never come close to the horrific levels seen in some West African nations. Thanks to aggressive education, public health and treatment programs, that burden appears to be declining.
“It’s been an exciting time being involved in what’s going on down there,” Wright says.
“U.S. medical schools are the backbone of this,” adds pioneering Haitian physician Dr. Jean Pape, founder and director of the GHESKIO centers, the oldest AIDS research organization in the developing world. “There is no way we could have done it without (them).”
There are several lines of collaboration between Vanderbilt and GHESKIO, an acronym that — in French — stands for the Haitian Study Group on AIDS-related infections.
Drs. David Haas, Cathy McGowan and Vladimir Berthaud are helping to establish an International AIDS Clinical Trial Unit in Port-au-Prince “to figure out the best ways to use drugs in resource-poor settings,” says Dr. Richard D’Aquila, director of the Vanderbilt-Meharry Center for AIDS Research.
Haas is principal investigator of the Vanderbilt AIDS Clinical Trials Center. McGowan is a faculty member in the Vanderbilt Infectious Diseases Division who provides medical care and teaching in Haiti. Berthaud, a native of Haiti who directs the Division of Infectious Diseases at Meharry Medical College, also trains Haitian AIDS specialists.
Those traveling to Haiti last month included Wright, D’Aquila, Haas, Drs. Spyros Kalams and Greg Wilson, and Janet Nicotera and Melissa Rueff of the AIDS Clinical Trials Center. Nicotera, clinical research coordinator, and Rueff, research technologist, helped Haitian researchers set up protocols for their studies. Kalams and Wilson are studying HIV disease in infants and young people.
The effort in Haiti is a critical part of the global fight against AIDS. “We live in a global village,” says Dr. Barney Graham, chief of the Viral Pathogenesis Laboratory and Clinical Trials Core at the NIH Vaccine Research Center.
“A problem anywhere in the world is everyone’s problem, and cannot be ignored.”
Graham, who formerly directed the AIDS Vaccine Evaluation Unit at Vanderbilt, also participated in last month’s visit.