Health – Page 2 – Melina Raquel Platas

February 1, 2012

The ongoing perils of childbirth

Published online February 1, 2012.

A problem of supply in services is limiting further improvements in maternal health

Fertility rates in Rwanda have been falling steadily over the past several years, but this year close to 400,000 Rwandan women will become pregnant and give birth. Next door in Uganda, four times as many women will become pregnant, approximately 1.5 million. If recent trends hold, nearly 10,000 of these women will lose their lives during or shortly after their pregnancy. Many of them will suffer from bleeding and infections that can be treated or prevented.

Surveys show that pregnant women in both Rwanda and Uganda seek antenatal care at very high rates. Nearly 98% of women in Rwanda and 95% in Uganda have at least one antenatal visit during their pregnancy. These women want information about their pregnancy, and seek out health services that they believe will help them have healthy babies. But often the health system fails to provide these women with the information they need to take care of themselves, and far too many mothers lose their lives because they do not receive emergency care in time. Rwanda has been showing steady progress in improving maternal health, but Uganda has faired poorly.

Both Uganda and Rwanda continue to have high levels of maternal mortality, defined as the death of a woman while pregnant, or within 42 days after the termination of pregnancy (excluding accidents). Between 1985 and 1995 in Uganda, maternal mortality was estimated at 527 deaths per 100,000 live births. The following decade, from 1996 to 2006, maternal mortality was estimated at 435 deaths.Although these figures suggest a slight decrease over the past twenty years, the margin of error around these estimates are such that we cannot say with any confidence that maternal mortality rates have changed at all between 1985 and today. Thus, it appears pregnant women in Uganda today are equally likely to die in childbirth as they were 25 years ago, when the National Resistance Movement came to power.

Meanwhile, maternal mortality in Rwanda has fallen significantly, although rates in Rwanda have for some time been higher than those in Uganda. Between 1995 and 1999, maternal mortality in Rwanda was estimated at 1071 deaths per 100,000 live births, one of the highest rates of maternal death in the world. Between 2000 and 2004, however, it had dropped to 750. The most recent estimates should be available in the next year or so, and are likely to show even further decline.

Rwanda may have made greater strides than Uganda in reducing maternal mortality in the past decade or so, but both countries face significant challenges in improving maternal health. There is a long way to go. The good news is that unlike many types of preventive health behaviors, such as getting immunizations or sleeping under a bednet, seeking help during pregnancy has become very common, even natural. In other words, the demand for health care during pregnancy appears higher than for many other health issues. Unfortunately, while demand is high, supply of care during pregnancy is weak.

Although nearly all pregnant women seek antenatal services at least once during their pregnancy, not all clinics and health facilities are equipped and ready to meet their needs. In fact, most health facilities are lacking the basics when it comes to antenatal care. The Service Provision Assessment Survey 2007 found that only 31% of health facilities in Rwanda had all the items required for infection control, including running water, soap, latex gloves, and disinfectant, and only 28% had all the essential supplies for basic antenatal care, including iron and folic acid tablets, tetanus vaccines, and equipment to measure blood pressure. A mere 11% had all the medicines required to treat pregnancy complications, including antibiotics, antimalarial drugs, and medication to treat common sexually transmitted infections.

To make matters worse, very few women were given sufficient information so that they could take good care of themselves at home during their pregnancy. Only 8% of women in Rwanda were told about signs of pregnancy complications, while only 35% of women in Uganda were informed. It is perhaps not surprising that only 35% of Rwandan women and 47% of Ugandan women attend the recommended four antenatal visits. When women arrive in clinics, often without power or water, which do not provide the necessary equipment and information to help them with their pregnancy, there may be little incentive to keep going back.

Of course, the news is not all bad. On the contrary, the improvements that have been made in maternal health, particularly in Rwanda, are extraordinarily impressive. In just five years, between 2005 and 2010, the percentage of mothers whose delivery was assisted by a trained and skilled provider increased from 39% to 69%. The percentage of mothers who delivered in a health facility jumped an equally miraculous 28% to 69%. The increase in births under the watch of a skilled provider has likely played a large role in the reduction of maternal mortality. An estimated 15% of all pregnant women will encounter life-threatening complications, and trained nurses, midwifes, and physicians can help make sure these complications do not become fatal.

The fact that pregnant women appear to seek out services and information at high rates is a great opportunity for public health, but this opportunity is squandered if health facilities are poorly equipped to provide care. While Rwanda has made strides in improving the supply of care, there is less evidence of improvement in Uganda. The results speak for themselves.

January 25, 2012

Name your price: it’s your life

Published online January 25, 2012.

Why small increases in price can lead to a steep decline in demand for essential products

A piece of nylon netting is a useful thing. It can be cast as a fishing net, hung as a curtain, or draped over a seedbed as protective covering. Netting can make a stunningly white wedding dress, or even a make-shift chicken coop.

One can also sleep under it, of course, to keep mosquitos from biting at night. Though insecticide treated nets (ITNs) are routinely distributed in malaria endemic regions, often subsidized by major donors such as the Global Fund, many worry that such campaigns are frequently futile. Anecdotal evidence from the Kenyan shores of Lake Victoria to the alters of Ugandan churches suggest that these bednets are sometimes quite literally cast aside or otherwise misused.

While misuse is certainly problematic from the perspective of those funding mosquito net campaigns, it also raises a broader question, and one with serious implications for public policy in malaria prevention and beyond: Do people value and use things that are given to them for free?

There are two competing arguments used to answer this question. The first argument says that people value more that on which they spend their own money or resources. Furthermore, people will spend some money, when they can afford it, on those objects that they perceive to be useful. A second argument says that if an object is perceived to be useful or of value, people will use that object regardless of whether they purchased it or whether it was given to them for free. The ubiquity of incumbent presidents’ campaign t-shirts in both opposition and stronghold areas is supporting evidence for those in the latter camp.

The mosquito net-cum-wedding dress is a classic illustration of the dilemma of freebies. The protective power of mosquito nets against mosquito bites and thus, malaria, is rather less effective when the net becomes a nuptial adornment or is tossed into a river, much less left in its packaging and stashed in a corner. The creative use of nets is thus often the go-to anecdote for those in the first camp of the freebie question.

Anecdotal evidence, unfortunately, can only get us so far in adjudicating between these two perspectives. Fortunately, a number of development economists have been systematically evaluating the extent to which people use services or tools given to them for free and those provided at a cost. While there is still no definitive answer, and while context matters, much of the evidence seems to suggest that people use many free goods at high rates, and often will not purchase the same products when provided even at very low prices.

A group of researchers at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, based at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT), recently wrote a report summarizing ten studies examining the question of whether user fees and cost-sharing increase or decrease the use of health and education services and products. The majority of the studies were conducted in Kenya, although some were also conducted in Uganda, Zambia, and India. Their findings are striking, and the title of the report says it all: “The price is wrong.”

Time and again, small increases in price lead to a massive decline in demand for products including water disinfectant, deworming medicine, mosquito nets, and soap. For example, one study in Kenya found that while over 80% of people used a mosquito net if they received it for free in a prenatal clinic, only 20% would purchase the net for $.60 (approximately 50 Kenyan shillings or 360 Rwanda Francs). Similarly, another study in Kenya found that while nearly 60% of people used water disinfectant when it was given to them for free, less than 10% would use disinfectant if charged $.30 for the same product. This general pattern appears to repeat itself in different locations and with different products.

Two things are thus evident. First, people are often unwilling to purchase a number of goods and services that promote health and education even at highly subsidized rates. Second, people often use those same goods and services at high rates if they are provided for free. Clearly, receiving something for free does not preclude its use. If we think back to the wedding veil problem however, it is also clear that some products may not be used as prescribed, fee or no fee.

Why are people so sensitive to price when it comes to potentially life-saving goods and services? Individuals and families weigh the costs, monetary or otherwise, of procuring and using goods and services against the expected benefits from using those goods. Bednet wedding veils notwithstanding, in most cases it appears that families perceive some benefit from using goods like mosquito nets and soap, since rates of usage are quite high when the product is free. Some speculate that people may not physically have the cash on hand to buy even very inexpensive products, or that other inconveniences, such as the time it takes to procure a product, may affect their decision. But these are only partial explanations. It is also possible that people do not believe products will be as efficacious as researchers and policymakers think they will be in promoting their health.

Available evidence suggests that people who receive goods and services for free often do use them, although the extent to which they will use them and how they will use them is subject to some debate. Even if there are large benefits to providing free bednets, water disinfectant, soap and the like, products that often provide benefits that extend beyond the individual recipient, the question of sustainability comes to the fore. In the short term, the provision of free goods and services, particularly those that promote preventive health behaviors (like hand-washing) may have large and positive effects on the health of families and communities. But ultimately, we need to better understand why people are often so unwilling to spend even small amounts on products that have the potential to keep their families much healthier.

January 21, 2012

Do medical injections spread HIV in Uganda?

A study by Mishra et al (2008) using data from the 2004-5 Uganda HIV/AIDS Sero-Behavioral Survey (UHSBS) suggests medical injections are positively associated with HIV status among Ugandan adults, even after taking into account other HIV risk factors and reverse causality (i.e. HIV positive individuals seek more medical care). Even if iatrogenic transmission is not the primary mode of transmission of HIV today (though Pepin argues it played a pivotal role in the early spread of HIV), this finding is worrisome. The authors conclude:

Our analysis showed a strong positive association between number of medical injections and HIV infection. Receiving frequent medical injections was significantly positively associated with HIV positive serostatus among Ugandan adults. Even after controlling for several potential confounders, and accounting for possible reverse causality from HIV infection to increased use of medical injections, men who received five or more medical injections in the previous 12 months were 2.3 times more likely to be HIV infected, and women 1.5 times more likely to be infected, compared with men and women who received no medical injections.
Our results are consistent with the literature showing a positive association between medical injections and HIV infection (Mann et al. 1986; Deuchert and Brody 2006; Barongo et al. 1992), and provide further evidence that medical injections may increase the risk of HIV infection.

…our finding of consistent and strong positive association between multiple medical injections and HIV infection reinforces the need to strengthen programs to promote injection safety and reduce non-sexual modes of HIV transmission. Medical injection as a potential mode of HIV transmission deserves continued research and programmatic attention. Program priorities for Uganda may include focus on rational use of injections, implementation of the national injection safety guidelines, and further scale up of medical injection safety programs.

January 16, 2012

Explaining health behavior

Pascaline Dupas has an excellent paper in the Annual Review of Economics: Health Behavior in Developing Countries. It’s well worth reading. Conclusion below:

Good health is both an input into one’s ability to generate income and an end in itself. As such, it is not surprising that a relatively vast literature is devoted to understanding the determinants of health behaviors. This literature has recently expanded to the study of health behaviors in low-income settings, for which good data are becoming increasingly available. This review is too short to be exhaustive, but it tries to present the most compelling evidence to date on this issue. The important thing to take away from this review is that when it comes to health behavior in developing countries, there are a substantial number of deviations from the neoclassical model. First of all, people seem to lack basic information, and sometimes have limited ability to process information, because of low education levels. Second, there are market imperfections and frictions, especially credit constraints, affecting people’s ability to invest in health. Finally, there seem to be some deviations from the rational model, with, as has been widely shown in developed countries, a nontrivial share of people exhibiting time-inconsistent preferences as well as myopia.
Overall, this suggests an important role for public policy when it comes to health. Above we identify four important demand-side policy tools: information, mandates, price subsidies, and financial incentives. All appear to have the potential to increase the sustained adoption of preventive behavior. But the success of these demand-side strategies is contingent on the supply side being adequate: on health services and products being available, with delivery and/or enforcement institutions that are effective. The issue of how to improve service delivery in health is outside the scope of this review, but it has been the focus of a number of recent and ongoing studies that will soon need a review of their own.

January 11, 2012

Science in the time of cholera (and nodding syndrome)

Published online January 11, 2012.

In August 1854 a terrible illness tore through a London neighborhood, killing hundreds in a matter of days. The terrifying disease emptied the body of fluid until vital organs shut down, after which point the petrified soul would succumb to the illness. Death often arrived less than twelve hours after the first signs of an upset stomach. Londoners of the day had a name for this illness, but did not understand its cause. They called it cholera.

Though cholera outbreaks had hit London before the mid-1800s, the Broad Street Pump outbreak of 1854 is now perhaps the best known. It was during this scourge that physician John Snow was able to demonstrate that cholera was not an airborne disease, as was the popular and professional opinion at the time, but rather a waterborne disease. This insight proved critical to improving public health in London and beyond. Londoners had been emptying their waste into the Thames, often just upstream of intake pipes for water companies. Their water and city stunk. But because disease was thought to be airborne, they doused smelly sidewalks in chloride of lime in attempt to purify the air. They made few attempts to purify the water so obviously contaminated with their own waste.

When cholera inevitably struck, they applied all manner of remedies, most of them useless at best. Castor oil, opium, and leeches were all espoused to treat cholera, not just by ordinary folks, but also by doctors. Worse still were treatments such as laxatives or bleeding. The extreme dehydration facilitated by cholera was often “treated” by attempts to further remove fluids from the body.

In hindsight, both the cause and the treatments for cholera are straightforward, if not obvious. Cholera is a waterborne illness that spreads when one person ingests the cholera-infected waste of another person. The treatment for the extreme dehydration that ensues is most fundamentally rehydration – consuming copious amounts of fluid to replace those that are lost. Yet at its emergence, a series of facts and observations did not at first fit together in a single theory about the cause of cholera. When cholera struck a household, sometimes it struck everyone, sometimes just a single person. In a neighborhood, some homes would be hard hit, while others escaped untouched. Whether you survived or not seemed random.

So it is with another illness in our midst – nodding disease. Nodding disease sounds like a folksy and tabloid-inspired syndrome. Its name describes the telltale symptoms of the disease, a rhythmic head nodding in children. The fact that unlike many diseases its name does not betray anything about its likely causes demonstrates just how little we know about its transmission. For example, HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) is named for the virus that causes AIDS. The name malaria comes from the Italian mala aria, meaning “bad air”, so named because the illness we now know is caused by a parasite was originally thought to be airborne.

But despite its odd name, nodding disease is far from folksy or fake. It is often fatal. First reported in Tanzania in 1962, nodding disease has since spread throughout what is now South Sudan, and has been rapidly spreading in northern Uganda as well.

The pattern of incidence of nodding disease and its symptoms are puzzling, as were those of cholera in the early nineteenth century. First, the onset of nodding disease appears to occur almost exclusively in children between the ages of 5 and 15.

Second, nodding is reportedly often triggered by the presence or eating of familiar foods, or when a child becomes cold. Unfamiliar foods, such as chocolate candy bars, do not induce nodding. Third, when untreated, those with nodding syndrome cease developing both physically and mentally. They are often stunted and experience mental retardation. Fourth, most children affected come from very poor families. There are now thousands of children in South Sudan and northern Uganda who experience symptoms of nodding disease, and the incidence of the syndrome appears to be increasing.

Several theories regarding the cause of the syndrome have been mooted, but none proven. For the past several years, teams of experts from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and World Health Organization (WHO) have travelled to South Sudan and northern Uganda in an attempt to better understand the causes of nodding disease, and possible treatments. Their work suggests that nodding disease is a new epilepsy syndrome, and that the characteristic head nodding is caused by seizures that lead to temporary lapses in neck muscle tone.

A vast majority of children experiencing symptoms of nodding disease are also infected with a parasite called Onchocerca volvulus, which causes river blindness. The high prevalence of this parasite in victims of nodding disease means that the most plausible (published) theory about the cause of nodding disease links the syndrome to O. volvulus, but how and why remain unclear. Moreover, there are a number of children both in and outside the region who are infected with the parasite and do not acquire nodding disease, so the link between the two is not straightforward.

So far, therefore, we have accumulated a series of facts about the mysterious syndrome, which have yet to be pieced together in a coherent theory. We have many more tools at our disposal than did the Londoners of the 1800s, but answers to pressing medical and public health questions do not usually come without time and resources. Nodding disease is a terrifying prospect for those living in South Sudan and northern Uganda not only because of the debilitating effect it has on children, but also because families and communities do not understand why their children are falling ill in the first place. A confusing array of facts, theories, and observations are unnerving both to those in the midst of the outbreak, but also those who see its spread as a very serious health issue for the region.

Misunderstanding the causes of nodding disease can have disastrous consequences, as was the case with cholera some 150 years ago. So far, anti-epilepsy treatments appear to be helping children experiencing nodding disease, but supplies of these treatments are often scarce, and determining the ultimate cause of epilepsy in these children should be a high priority for health officials. Cases of epilepsy are often documented at high rates in hospitals in the region, and there is thought to be a link between epilepsy and cerebral malaria as well. In Arua Regional Referral Hospital, in northwestern Uganda at the border with Sudan and DRC, 7 percent of all outpatient children over age 5 in April 2009 were diagnosed with epilepsy. In 2004/05, 74 percent (nearly 4500) of all cases in the Mental Ward were diagnosed as epilepsy.

Clearly, epilepsy, whether nodding disease or otherwise, is a condition that deserves the utmost attention from public health and medical professionals. The sooner we understand the causes of this new breed of epileptic seizures, the sooner we can take steps to both treat it and prevent its spread. In the absence of a compelling theory about its cause, however, fear and futile treatments are likely to ensue.

January 8, 2012

Gender and Development

A topic worth exploring. From the 2012 World Development Report, Gender Equality and Development:

The lives of girls and women have changed dramatically over the past quarter century. Today, more girls and women are literate than ever before, and in a third of developing countries, there are more girls in school than boys. Women now make up over 40 percent of the global labor force. Moreover, women live longer than men in all regions of the world. The pace of change has been astonishing—indeed, in many developing countries, they have been faster than the equivalent changes in developed countries: What took the United States 40 years to achieve in increasing girls’ school enrollment has taken Morocco just a decade.

In some areas, however, progress toward gender equality has been limited—even in developed countries. Girls and women who are poor, live in remote areas, are disabled, or belong to minority groups continue to lag behind. Too many girls and women are still dying in childhood and in the reproductive ages. Women still fall behind in earnings and productivity, and in the strength of their voices in society. In some areas, such as education, there is now a gender gap to the disadvantage of men and boys.

The main message of this year’s World Development Report: Gender Equality and Development is that these patterns of progress and persistence in gender equality matter, both for development outcomes and policy making.

December 28, 2011

Researching Nodding Disease

Nodding disease is a syndrome that was first reported in Tanzania in 1962, has been spreading in South Sudan and Uganda more recently. The number of cases in northern Uganda appear to have increased at a particularly fast clip in the last year. Nodding disease sounds made-up, but it is very real and often fatal, and is becoming a growing problem in the region. Most problematic is that the causes of nodding disease are still unclear, although there appears to be a connection with a parasitic infection from Onchocerca Volvulus, which causes river blindness.

The Daily Monitor ran a story on December 23, 2011, quoting director of health services in Uganda, Dr. Jane Achieng, as saying that there are around 2,200 reported cases of nodding disease in Uganda (most in Acholi sub-region) and that the first case in the area had been reported in 2009.

A letter to the Daily Monitor written by Dr. Ddungu, of the Uganda Programme on Cancer and Infectious Diseases, notes that a similar phenomenon was studied in Kyarusozi sub-county as early as 1991. A 1992 study by E. Ovuga et al. on this topic was published in the East African Medical Journal.

Nodding disease appears to afflict children between the ages of 5 and 15 and is usually diagnosed by the characteristic nodding it produces in children. The head nodding (HN) is often triggered by eating or seeing familiar foods, or when a child becomes cold. Winkler et al. (2008) write:

HN represents a repetitive short loss of neck muscle tone resulting in a nodding of the head, sometimes associated with a short loss of muscle tone of the upper extremities. Loss or impairment of consciousness may be present, but not always. To date HN is not mentioned in any classification and it remains unclear whether it represents a seizure disorder and if so, whether it belongs to the group of generalized or partial seizures.

Nodding disease appears to be a growing problem that warrants serious attention from the government. The CDC and WHO have been involved in investigating its causes, but there has been relatively little information available to the public about this illness. I’ll be posting information on the published medical literature on nodding disease, as well as news updates and commentary as they become available.

December 19, 2011

Analyzing Africa: The Audacity of Despair

A new, defiant image

Published online at The Independent, Rwanda Edition, December 17, 2011

In 2000, the cover of The Economist pictured a boy wielding an AK47 inside the outline of the African continent, surrounded by black. “The hopeless continent,” the cover ominously read. At the time a combination of factors led the magazine and a whole host of bystanders to throw up their hands in despair, and mentally close the door to hope for the future of “Africa.” A decade later, The Economist, whose cover this week reads, “Africa rising” and many others, are waking up, wide-eyed, to realize the tremendous growth and progress that has been taking place on the continent all along. Progress has not been even, or without crushing reversals along the way. But given the history of development across the globe, it is entirely unclear why we should have anticipated linear progress, or lament its absence. Political, social, and economic development will carry on with or without handwringing at one extreme, or ululations at the other.

There have been at least two common mistakes in assessing progress (or the lack thereof) in “Africa,” which together have made for some rather wrongheaded analyses. First, there is a danger in conflating levels of development with development itself. It is obvious to all that levels of per capita income, education, and mortality, for example are lower on average in Africa than anywhere else. The issue of levels, however, is entirely different from change over time. Contrary to popular belief, improvement in both human and economic development was occurring in Africa before the dawn of the new millennium, just not everywhere. This leads me to the second analytic pitfall – the “Africa is a country” problem.

It is obvious to all that Africa is not a country but a continent, but analysis nonetheless often treats Africa as if it were one political, economic, or social unit. It is not. There is tremendous variation across the continent in both levels of development and rates of improvement over time. A failure to acknowledge the divergent paths countries have taken leads to the kind of essentialisation one tends to regret.

It is all too easy to essentialize. The mind recalls the most extreme cases, and remembers those that support prior beliefs. So in 2000, near the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, with flooding, drought, the Second Congo War, political crisis in Sierra Leone and a waffling UN Security Council, it was easy to create an image of Africa that was tearing itself to pieces. “Africa was weak before the Europeans touched its coasts. Nature is not kind to it,” wrote The Economist. “This may be the birthplace of mankind, but it is hardly surprising that humans sought other continents to live in.” Ouch.

As noted, it is true that levels of development, that is, income per capita, literacy, infant mortality, and many other measures of development, are comparatively far lower in sub-Saharan Africa, but all of this ignores the changes that have been taking place. In the 1990s, for instance, despite much pessimism, a number of countries held multi-party elections, a wave that started with Benin in 1991. While these countries would not become flourishing liberal democracies overnight, the 1990s would mark the beginning of the end of dictatorship as we know it.

There was also an effort to improve access to education, and the percentage of children completing primary school grew in a number of countries, including Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, The Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Malawi, Togo, and Uganda, albeit occasionally starting at very low levels. Gains in education were not achieved everywhere, and schooling declined in some countries, but this fact only further demonstrates the variation in performance across African countries.

The best news is that although improvement in education varied, improvements in health over the past several decades have been nearly universal. Since 1960, child mortality has fallen in every single African country for which there is data, with the possible exception of Somalia. Even in a country like the Central African Republic (CAR), notorious for its poor governance, under-5 mortality fell by half over the past fifty years, from 300 to just over 150 deaths per 1000 births. In 1960, just over one in three children born in CAR would not live to see their fifth birthday; today six out of seven will survive childhood. Moreover, in spite of the devastating HIV/AIDS pandemic, which has claimed millions of lives, the hardest hit African countries are rebounding, and child and maternal mortality rates are again declining in countries like Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe.

Economically, the performance of African countries has been diverse for decades, with some countries consistently growing and others wallowing in economic misery. A number of African countries experienced periods of negative economic growth throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and into the 1990s, which, along with population growth throughout, meant that several had the same or even lower levels of per capita income in the 1990s than they had at independence.

Still, many countries began to see positive economic growth in the 1990s or earlier, including countries as diverse as Angola, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Congo (Brazzaville), Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Mozambique, Rwanda, Senegal, Uganda, and Zambia. Some of these economies are reliant on commodities such as oil and minerals, but service and other sectors comprise an increasing share of the economy in many countries, and regional trade has grown as well.

Average levels of development give Africa a bad name, but initial conditions were different from most of the rest of the world, and rates of improvement have often equaled or exceeded those in the developed world. As interest in Africa is piqued by double-digit economic growth figures and opportunities for investment, we will continue to see discussion of a part of the world most people inadvertently essentialize. Fortunately, I think the audacity of despair that has pervaded western thinking on Africa has left little in its wake other than egg on some faces. The audacity of hope has now come to the fore.

December 8, 2011

HIV in colonial Africa

Online this week in The Independent (Rwanda Edition): How public health efforts likely contributed to the early spread of HIV.

The Tragic Amplifier

Published online December 8, 2011.

This year marks the 90th anniversary, approximately, of the introduction of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) into the human population. It also marks thirty years since HIV was first scientifically recognized in 1981. Since the 1920s, this virus has spread across the globe and become the HIV/AIDS pandemic we are all too familiar with today. Most people consider the 1980s to be the beginning of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, but the virus had been prevalent in populations living in parts of central Africa for decades before it became a global nightmare.

New evidence from epidemiologist and international health expert Jacques Pepin suggests that human efforts to improve public health in central Africa were critical in facilitating the early spread of HIV, which has since claimed nearly 30 million lives. In the past two decades, massive coordination, mobilization, innovation, and investment have managed to slow the epidemic and save millions. As we mark World AIDS Day on December 1, 2011, HIV/AIDS is a reminder to us all of the tremendous power of human folly, but also of human triumph.

The Origins of AIDS, by Pepin, is a remarkable new book that pieces together the emergence of HIV in the human population, and its subsequent spread across the globe. HIV is the human version of simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), which has been present in chimpanzee populations of central Africa for hundreds of years. Human contact with chimpanzees led to at least one transmission of SIV to HIV in a human in the early 1920s, most likely a hunter or a cook living in central Africa, where the majority of SIV-carrying chimpanzees live. This transmission alone was extremely unlikely to have triggered an HIV epidemic, and indeed chimpanzee-to-human transmission could have occurred on separate occasions prior to the 1920s, but would not have spread far. An infected hunter may have passed HIV to his family members, but in all likelihood, the virus would have stopped there. Why did HIV begin to spread beyond a few infected individuals in the early 1920s?

Pepin argues that heterosexual transmission, which is the predominant mode of transmission of HIV today, could not alone have led to an outbreak of HIV on a scale that would trigger a pandemic. Thus, there must have been some kind of “amplifier” that allowed for very rapid transmission of HIV to many people at a time. And what was the mostly likely initial culprit in the amplification of the virus? Colonial public health campaigns involving widespread use of unsterilized syringes and needles.

In the 1930s and 1940s, colonial administrations in French Cameroon, the Belgian Congo, and elsewhere began massive public health campaigns to treat various infectious diseases, including yaws, syphilis, malaria, leprosy, and sleeping sickness, using syringes and needles which were not sterilized regularly, if at all (oral tablet versions of treatments were not available for these diseases at the time). Although there are no blood samples from this time period still in existence (the oldest blood sample in which HIV has been detected dates back to 1959, taken from a man living in Leopoldville, Congo, now known as Kinshasa), it is well documented that other less lethal viruses, like Hepatitis C, were transmitted via syringes in Cameroon, Gabon, and the Belgian Congo, among other colonies. It is not difficult to imagine that HIV could have been passed quickly through a population via syringe as well.

One clinic to treat sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) in Leopoldville treated up to 1000 patients a day by the mid-1950s, with documented evidence that medical equipment was not sterilized between patients. To make matters worse, HIV was likely introduced into Leopoldville/Kinshasa at a time when there was a dramatic gender imbalance due to colonial policies. Urban areas like Leopoldville were often the equivalent of “work camps” in which wives and children were not welcome, which resulted in widespread prostitution, further facilitating the spread of HIV through heterosexual transmission.

HIV, which first spread through non-sterile syringes, often in clinics aimed at treating sexually transmitted diseases among men and sex workers in urban areas, kept at a steady prevalence through heterosexual transmission among the same population. In the colonial period, female sex workers, or “free women”, had only a few regular clients each year, but by the time of independence, female prostitutes would often see up to 1000 clients per year. This new type of prostitution greatly facilitated the transmission of HIV to populations beyond urban areas, and spread along major trades routes and cities in central and eastern Africa, including Kigali.

By 1984-85, Kigali, which at the time had a high ratio of males to females, and thriving prostitution, had the highest recorded HIV prevalence in the world, with 80 percent of prostitutes, 50 percent of STD patients, and 15-20 percent of blood donors, factory workers, and hospital employees testing positive for HIV. By 1987, HIV prevalence was at 17.8 percent in urban areas and jumped to 27 percent in urban areas by 1996.

From central Africa, HIV soon spread to Haiti, before being transmitted via multiple routes to the United States and beyond. Today, 34 million people are living with HIV/AIDS, and another 29 million have perished. That the spread of this virus was likely facilitated, and perhaps only possible, with the help of human technology and early public health campaigns should give us pause, and remind us of the terrifying potential for destruction due to human folly. As Pepin writes, “When humans manipulate nature in a way that they do not fully understand, there is always a possibility that something unpredictable will occur.”

Turning the tide on the spread of HIV/AIDS has taken decades, and millions have tragically lost their lives in the process. But the HIV/AIDS epidemic also demonstrates the amazing power of human innovation and cooperation that can take place on a global scale. Today, there are 6.6 million people receiving life-saving antiretroviral treatment, and both AIDS-related deaths and new HIV infections are declining in most parts of the world. The time, research, energy and money that have gone into tackling HIV has been phenomenal. If anything, we are now in danger of devoting too few resources to other health challenges that must also vie for the attention of the global health community and domestic health budgets.

HIV/AIDS is an extraordinarily painful reminder of the good intentions that can pave the road to hell, and of the unique capability of humans to create as well as destroy.

December 1, 2011

HIV/AIDS: Human folly and triumph

Today is World AIDS Day. HIV has taken the lives of an estimated 29 million people around the world, and currently around 34 million people are infected. The effort of many individuals, organizations, and governments has led to a turnaround in the pandemic, infection rates and deaths due to AIDS are falling in most parts of the world. Still, there is a long way to go, and many people still do not have access to life-saving drugs.

A new book by Jacques Pepin, The Origins of AIDS, provides a remarkable account of how HIV initially spread among populations in central Africa, and later became the pandemic we know today. His sobering finding is that human efforts to treat and prevent disease with the use of non-sterilized syringes in colonial Africa very likely facilitated early and rapid HIV transmission. I discuss his work in this week’s column, excerpts of which is below.

HIV/AIDS: Human folly and triumph (published in this week’s Independent Rwanda Edition)

This year marks the 90^th anniversary, approximately, of the introduction of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) into the human population. It also marks thirty years since HIV was first scientifically recognized in 1981. Since the 1920s, this virus has spread across the globe and become the HIV/AIDS pandemic we are all too familiar with today. Most people consider the 1980s to be the beginning of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, but the virus had been prevalent in populations living in parts of central Africa for decades before it became a global nightmare.

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HIV/AIDS is an extraordinarily painful reminder of the good intentions that can pave the road to hell, and of the unique capability of humans to create as well as destroy.