May 6 2008
CBS' "60 Minutes" on Sunday profiled Paul Farmer, co-founder of Partners in Health, which provides no-cost medical care for people with HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and other conditions in Haiti and eight other countries worldwide.
The group's work focuses on increasing access to medical care by lowering treatment costs and training local residents to provide care.
Jim Kim, professor at Harvard Medical School and a co-founder of Partners in Health, said that when Farmer "stared treating people in 1998 in Haiti, everyone said he was absolutely nuts," adding, "And here we are, you know, not even a decade later, where the goal is to treat every single human on the planet who needs HIV treatment with the right drugs."
According to "60 Minutes," Kim and Farmer also have worked to lower prices for drugs to treat multi-drug resistant TB by improving access to generics. In addition, the organization trains community health workers to visit HIV/AIDS and TB patients at home to ensure they adhere to their treatment regimens (Pitts, "60 Minutes," CBS, 5/4).
 This article was reprinted from khn.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
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