Zimbabwe: It Takes a Village
Written by Jon Cohen
NYAMUTORA, Zimbabwe — For decades, this speck of a village was just like hundreds of others in this poor, badly governed, and HIV-ravaged country: Villagers watched as one person after another slowly withered from AIDS, rib cages jutting from torsos, cheeks sinking, and a hodgepodge of infections running riot through their organs. But now, Nyamutora is a model of how an innovative response to this disease can actually help end the AIDS epidemic across rural Africa.
A five-year-old program here has solved a surprisingly vexing piece of the HIV puzzle: making sure infected people take their drugs. HIV medications are extremely effective. If taken properly, they make the virus all but disappear from the bloodstream, which has two big effects. One is that it restores the immune system, allowing even very sick people to become healthy again. The other is that it almost eliminates the risk of spreading the virus. Keep the transmission rates low enough and the AIDS epidemic will die out altogether.