School receives $22.5 million grant to open facilities

By TODD ACKERMAN
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle

Sept. 2, 2008, 10:51PM

Baylor College of Medicine's International Pediatric AIDS Initiative will expand to a seventh African country — Tanzania — thanks to a $22.5 million grant from President Bush's effort to fight the disease globally.

 

The recently announced grant from the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief will allow Baylor to build two centers and satellite clinic facilities in the sub-Saharan country in East Africa.

 

"Tanzania is an ideal setting for this new program," said Dr. Mark Kline, a Baylor professor of pediatrics and the president of the college's pediatric AIDS initiative. "There is a huge unmet need for HIV/AIDS treatment, especially among children."

The grant is the second Baylor has received from the $48 billion Bush program. A Baylor center opening next month in Uganda received a $12.5 million grant from the Bush program in 2005.

 

The Tanzania program is receiving another $6 million from private donors, including the Abbott Fund, Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation, Houston oilman Dan Duncan and his wife, Jan, Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word and the college's partner, Texas Children's Hospital.

 

Kline said Baylor hopes to provide lifesaving HIV/AIDS treatment to at least 20,000 Tanzanian children and train hundreds of health professionals. Tanzania is home to about 1.4 million people with HIV/AIDS, but currently there are few resources for the care and treatment of HIV-infected children.

 

The Tanzania centers are slated to open in December 2009 in Mbeya and Mwanza. But Baylor and Texas Children's doctors, working in partnership with Tanzanian health professionals, will begin staffing clinical activities in the two cities by next month.

This marks the first time the Baylor's Pediatrics AIDS Initiative has located two centers in one country. There are currently Baylor centers in Botswana, Swaziland, Lesotho, Malawi and Burkina Faso.

 

Baylor started construction on a center in Kenya in 2007, but it was discontinued in the face of post-election violence and an agreement-nixing reorganization of Kenya's ministry of health. A Baylor spokesperson said Tuesday that the college would evaluate opening a Kenya center again once it could be certain that staffers there would be safe and a new agreement could be established.

 

todd.ackerman@...