February 2, 2009.
HIV Care at the village level.
GAIA Vaccine Foundation has received permission from the Malian national AIDS agencies to establish the firt HIV care TB/HIV outreach program in a village clinic, located in Sikoro Mali. The new “Project Hope” HIV care center will open its doors on February 2, 2009.
Treatment for HIV and TB in peri-urban Mali, West Africa is constrained by extreme poverty and limited access to health care. Even though treatment for TB and antiretrovirals is free or low cost, few individuals are aware of the importance of treatment and even fewer have access to the centers where these lifesaving medications are distributed. Currently, only 18,000 of the estimated 180,000 Malians living with HIV infection have access to HIV care.
The GAIA HIV Care center is based in one such village “CSCOM”. This CSCOM, located in Sikoro, a village on the outskirts of Bamako that houses 40,000 of the region’s poorest citizens. Doctors at GAIA’s Hope Center Clinic is currently following 120 HIV patients from the village, and an estimated 1,000 more such villagers need HIV care. Until this week, those patients had to travel by bus or taxi to another hospital to get their medications. Most Malians cannot afford transportation, and as a result, only a handful of the patients at the clinic routinely obtained HIV care. GAIA built a new HIV care center called the “Hope Center Clinic” (finished in June, 2008) with the help of Gilead Foundation, Keep a Child Alive, Textron, and local Rhode Island donors. The “Hope Center Clinic” will be the first CSCOM to offer HIV care in West Africa.
Peri-urban CSCOMS are ideal for this type of CSCOM-based HIV care and HIV/TB outreach program because they usually serve higher risk populations and because they are organized in “communes” centered around satellite infirmary-style clinics (CSCOMs), several of which are linked to a larger “Centre de Soins de Référence” (CS Réf) for supervision and management of complicated cases.
GAIA Mission – A Not-for-Profit Vaccine
The mission of GAIA Vaccine Foundation is Global Vaccine, Global Access. It is the goal of GAIA to distribute the HIV vaccine developed as a result of this project at no profit in developing countries. Initial studies of the GAIA HIV/AIDS vaccine are being carried out by Dr. Annie De Groot and Bill Martin at EpiVax, a Rhode Island based bioinformatics company, in collaboration with Dr. Ken Mayer at the Miriam Hospital and Dr. Ousmane Koita of the Faculty of Science and Technology at the University of Bamako. These three entities, working in collaboration, and depending on funding, project that they will deliver a vaccine ready for a Phase I clinical trials within four years.
When not working on the vaccine . . .
The Global Alliance to Immunize against AIDS (GAIA) is working hard to stop HIV on a global scale.
GAIA’s mission is to promote the development of a globally relevant and globally accessible vaccine against AIDS. However, since the development of such a vaccine is years away, GAIA also coordinates HIV education, prevention and access to care programs in Providence and Bamako, working to stop HIV until a vaccine is developed.
In keeping with these objectives, GAIA has developed innovative programs to disseminate HIV prevention information such as the Here Bolo peer education program, presented at the World AIDS Conference in Mexico, July 2008, and “Chez Rosalie”, a mother to child HIV transmission prevention program based at the Hope Center Clinic in Bamako.