A Tale of Two Cities

What started out as a private phone line in a person's house to talk to people suffering from HIV/AIDS has now turned into a mobile e-health clinic that provides both education and medical support. The Medical Advocacy and Outreach Selma clinic aims to eliminate barriers, such as geographical location and stigma, for those with HIV/AIDS while also acting as a touchpoint for those with other primary and mental health care needs.

Two columns on how Iran is treating its massive epidemic of injecting drug use by tackling it as a health problem, effectively lowering H.I.V. rates among drug users using an approach to drugs known as harm reduction.

Volunteers with India’s Meds For More initiative (MFM) collect leftover unused medications from recovered Covid-19 patients by canvassing their apartment buildings, offices, student clubs, schools, and other locations. Once collected, MFM distributes them to NGOs licensed to work in the health sector, who transport the medicines to marginalized communities in urban and rural areas. Medical professionals sort and pack the medicines and give them to local hospitals and health care centers, who distribute them to patients. The success of the program has inspired similar initiatives in several other cities.

Rwanda, a country with the same population of Ohio, has emerged as an example of how to slow the spread of coronavirus, with only 1,500 cases reported so far. Besides initiating a lockdown, implementing free testing, and recruiting community health care workers, police, and college students to be contact tracers, officials also used "the same structure, same people, same infrastructure and laboratory diagnostics" that had been working to contain the spread of HIV.

There are over one million people in the United States living with HIV, reaching a crisis level in states such as Georgia; however, countries like Namibia are offering lessons for how to tackle the problem. By offering a community-centered approach that addresses underlying issues like poverty and lack of access to education, the country has seen a significant decrease in new diagnoses.

Many health care facilities that supply needles don't have the proper training or experience to work with trans-identified people that are undergoing hormone therapy. To help address this gap in care, an education and advocacy nonprofit in Eugene, Oregon acts as a hub for the community's clean needle exchange needs.

The M-Pima kit is a quick, easy to use device to accurately measure the HIV load in a blood sample. With this tool, clinics lacking in technology or staff expertise don't have to send samples to places with these resources, but rather can use the kit to obtain the same information in an hour.

In the past two years, Zika virus has arisen as one of the most pressing public health concerns. This piece charts the worldwide efforts by doctors using new technology to develop a vaccine for Zika.

People with HIV/AIDS don't always know where to go for help or don't feel empowered to return when psychiatrists or doctors seem unwelcoming. Organizations throughout Washington, D.C. are working against perception by providing comprehensive approaches to health care services.

When health care funding was cut in the United States, HIV clinics were hit harder than some other areas, impacting not just the medicine, but also the staff in these facilities. The Whitman-Walker Clinic in the District of Columbia, however, found a way to combat these changes by broadening the range of people they were caring for and mimicking service providers that were qualified as federally qualified health centers.