Inspiring Doctors ,Go Far Afield to Battle Epidemics

Dr. Young, 33, & the nurses they trained here have persuaded lots of pregnant females to get tested & take the drugs that prevent them from passing the illness to their newborns. It is all part of a charitable hard work they joined in 2008 for $40,000 a year & the chance to work in this AIDS-afflicted country, which has one pediatrician in its whole government health method.

MASHAI, Lesotho , At a clinic in the mountains, reached only by crossing a churning river in a rowboat, Dr. Paul Young, a pediatrician raised in the housing projects of Savannah, Ga., soothed a fussy infant. He stared at him, fascinated, as they made soft popping sounds together with his lips & listened to her heart through a stethoscope. I was two times afraid to look at the babies check results,they said after examining a bunch of kids, who were born healthy despite having H.I.V.-positive mothers. But now, most of them are negative.

If this was the last thing I did, if this was the only job I ever had in life, I would have served my purpose, they said.

Dr. Young represents the surging interest of young Americans in combating the deadly epidemics ravaging the world's poorest countries, fueled in part by the billions of dollars that the American government, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation & other organizations have poured in to international health in recent years.

Across sub-Saharan Africa, an extreme shortage of health workers remains a critical barrier to fighting illness. The region bears a quarter of the world's burden of illness, but has only 3 percent of its health care workers, according to the World Health Organization.

Public health specialists say efforts like the one involving Dr. Young have proved useful on a continent that sorely needs pediatricians, surgeons & other specialists to train African doctors & nurses in the field.

Today's students need to make a difference in the world, said Michael H. Merson, director of Duke University's Global Health Institute. They have a passion for sacrifice & service. It reminds me of the 60s.

& demand for such opportunities is rising. Over 70 universities in the United States & Canada now offer formal academic programs in global health, most of them developed in the past two years, according to the Consortium of Universities for Global Health.

& Barbara Bush, 29, a daughter of former President George W. Bush, co-founded the nonprofit Global Health Corps, which this year sent 36 college graduates from four countries to work with nonprofit groups, mostly in Rwanda, Burundi, Malawi & Uganda. Over 1,000 people applied for the yearlong fellowships.

The kids of powerful politicians are part of this new generation of global health fanatics. Vanessa Kerry, 34, a Harvard-trained doctor & the daughter of Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, is advocating a Peace Corps-like federal program that would send American doctors & nurses to work & train health workers in developing countries.

In addition to the wage, the program paid down as much as $40,000 of the doctor's educational debt for each year of service making it feasible for Dr. Young to join, though they owed $170,000 after his undergraduate & medical studies. His sister was an assembly-line worker, & in hard times the relatives relied on Medicaid. Dr. Young himself never had a steady pediatrician as a infant.

The Pediatric AIDS Corps that sent Dr. Young here, largely financed by the Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation & the Baylor College of Medicine, never advertised for candidates after the first class of doctors was recruited in 2005. Word of mouth produced far more highly qualified physicians from universities all over the United States than the project could ever hire.

With a laugh, they said that his friends back home asked him if they had jogging water or used an outhouse in Africa. We're not roughing it here by any means,they tells them. They drives a 10-year-old Opel Corsa, but lives in a pleasant town house in the sleepy capital, Maseru, with wireless Web as well as a housekeeper who comes once a week. For the first time in his life, they has gone skiing in Lesotho's breathtaking mountains.

But it is the work that gives the job its meaning, the doctors say. Lineo Thahane attended Princeton University & got her medical degree at Washington University in St. Louis. It was a 2003 rotation in Lesotho's main public hospital in the coursework of her residency when kids were still dying of AIDS for lack of antiretroviral treatment that made her need to return to Africa. Her parents were both from Lesotho, but he was born & raised in the suburbs of Washington, D.C.

Dr. Thahane, 35, joined the first crop of Pediatric AIDS Corps doctors in Lesotho, & now helps her sister, Dr. Edith Mohapi, 64, who for 20 years managed pediatric outpatient services at Arlington Hospital in Virginia, to run Baylos pediatric H.I.V. programs in Lesotho.

I felt, This is where the necessity is,  Dr. Thahane said.

Over the past two years, the corps has had 50 to 60 doctors working in Lesotho, Swaziland, Malawi & Botswana. The hospitals & clinics they supervise now look after over 50,000 H.I.V.-positive kids, Baylor estimates.

The project's impact ought to also last beyond its financing, which ends in June. The 128 doctors who served in the corps historically two years trained about 3,000 African professionals, who will carryover on. & in July, Baylor will start another project with 32 pediatricians to work on a broader array of diseases.

Until 2005, not a single infant with AIDS was on publicly financed antiretroviral therapy in Lesotho.

Dr. Grace Phiri, an overworked Malawian who has been the only pediatrician in Lesotho's government service for most of the past 17 years, said the arrival of 10 AIDS Corps doctors in 2006  as AIDS drugs for kids were becoming more widely obtainable  drastically improved the survival chances of H.I.V.-positive kids.