Video: First-responders to HIV in Haiti reminisce

In our March issue, staff writer Bob Grant traveled to Haiti to see the science behind a successful public health program in a developing country. He spent time at a clinic in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Port-au-Prince and met researchers who have been battling the HIV/AIDS epidemic since it began ravishing the country in the early 1980s. In these videos, Haitian physicians Jean Pape and Bernard Liautaud remember their early work with Haitian HIV/AIDS patients at a time when the international community was just waking up to the problem.

Pape and Liautaud recognized that HIV/AIDS was gaining a foothold in their country before the disease was called an epidemic - before it even had a name. In 1982 the two, along with several colleagues in Haiti and abroad, started The Haitian Study Group on Kaposi's Sarcoma and Opportunistic Infections (GHESKIO) in downtown Port-au-Prince. GHESKIO is still in operation today, and thousands of Haitians pass through its guarded gates every year.

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