Partners in Health is a worldwide organization dedicated to the eradication of tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS in places where the resources are inadequate to cure these diseases. Dr. Paul Farmer, founder and sole proprietor of Partners in Health came from a very rough childhood. Farmer’s father carted his family around while briefly holding many small jobs in various parts of the country and often times taken up residence in such places and abandoned houseboats and school buses. He did his undergraduate studies at Duke University where he was first exposed to the hardships that other people face by volunteering in Duke’s hospitals and in local labor camps that were primarily composed of Haitian workers. After his four years at Duke, Farmer enrolled at Harvard where he earned two doctorates simultaneously. While attending Harvard, Farmer visited the small, poor village of Cange, Haiti in 1983. Shocked by what he saw, Farmer vowed to continue to study long distance at Harvard while applying what he learned to his work in Haiti. After receiving his two degrees in 1990 Farmer had already treated a number of patients comparable to those of a career of regular doctors. In order to gain the necessary funding for his work in Cange, Farmer established an organization with fellow Harvard med student, Jim Yong Kim, called Partners in Health in 1987 that was based in Boston. The small clinic that Farmer and Kim setup in Cange was the nations first community-based healthcare system. Since its inception as a small shack where patients could come in and be diagnosed and receive limited treatment, PIH has greatly expanded to an extremely well adept network of facilities equipped now with operating rooms, a blood bank, satellite and other high tech communications, laptops, and a variety of modern medicines. PIH has also expanded its area of expertise from specializing in the treatment of primarily tuberculosis and in some cases HIV/AIDS to a vast array of treatment plans for tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other infectious diseases. Treatment of these diseases has branched off from not only treatment plans available in the United States and Haiti but also to Russia, Peru, Guatemala, Mexico, and Rwanda. One important way that PIH differs from a normal healthcare setup is that it not only provides needy patients with medicines and surgeries, but also with food, water, clothing, and shelter, and education delivered by trained professionals who are then paid as if they were community health workers. With this mission statement alongside the developments of new medicines and treatment plans by Farmer and Kim, PIH are living examples that hundreds of thousands of deaths that would result from infectious diseases in third-world countries can be prevented. Farmer started addressing other concerns related to daily life other than just medicine when he started up his nonprofit organization from his workings in Haiti. In addition to given the poor Haitians a chance at a better life through the introduction of antiretroviral treatments, Farmer worked tirelessly at providing necessities to the poorest region of the poorest country in the West. Farmer recognized the peoples’ needs for safe drinking water, concrete floors, houses, tin roofs, and schools. Farmer teamed up with a major Haitian bank, Fonkoze, and opened branches to every one of the PIH clinics in Haiti, giving the people access to their own personal bank accounts. This action along with the many others was notable enough that PIH received the Hilton Prize of $1.5 million, which is an award given out to an organization that works towards and significantly alleviates human suffering. The reception of the award marks a huge milestone in the journey of PIH of bringing adequate healthcare to the poor and suffering nations around the world. PIH has not been without its many problems despite their great achievements. In 1996 there was an outbreak of drug-resistant TB in Lima, Peru. Farmer and co-founder of PIH Jim Yong Kim traveled to Peru and began an attempt to resolve the epidemic. They experimented with seven different drugs and remained optimistic as they administered the medication and observed the patients’ conditions. Eventually the patients living in the shantytown in Peru got exceptionally better and the cure rates of the town exceeded eighty percent, which is notably better than most hospitals in the United States. This feat is just another example of how Farmer’s dream has potential that good healthcare can and should be available to everyone. Along with fighting TB throughout the world, PIH has joined the fight against a much tougher adversary that is looming its ugly head on our world today more than it ever has. Today, AIDS is more of a global threat than it was 20 years ago. Not just limited to the African continent, it now thrives in communities in the United States and is becoming more common in Russia. Besides the imminent death of all those infected, AIDS is now posing greater threats. Life expectancy in Africa is predicted to drop from 59 years to 45 years. The poor African communities will continue in some parts to trade sex for food and other necessities thus furthering the spread of the virus. Building foundation for a solid government will also become more difficult as the spread of AIDS continues. As the life expectancy rates drop it will be difficult for any leader or leaders to remain in office and a stable government will be hard to achieve and also to maintain. The continent of Africa is ill equipped to handle the AIDS problem and now the virus is building up at an alarming rate in Russia where little is known about the virus or how to deal with and prevent it. The main problem with the AIDS virus is not addressing the problem itself but being able to figure out a way to do something significant about it. Although in the past 25 years AIDS has killed more than 20 million people, there is room for hope. The development of antiretroviral treatments has greatly reduced the number of deaths in many different countries and has become a beacon of optimism among the suffering. However, very few countries are able to afford such treatments like the United States can, but those that do have seen significant improvements in their infrastructures and the overall health of their population. Many experts believe that introducing such advanced treatments to such poor countries that are already plagued by the epidemic is not cost-effective and therefore should not be considered a high priority. Despite what they said, PIH helped found a base for the use of the advanced medical technology in rural Haiti. Still there are other experts that believe that even if sufficient money was available to help combat the spread of HIV and AIDS in poverty-stricken countries the countries have such a lacking infrastructure that it would be pointless to shovel money in their direction if in the end the lack of infrastructure will still inhibit advances from being made. PIH has found a certain remedy to this problem by hiring local healthcare workers in the areas that are lacking in that field. In many places that are ridden with poverty and that combat the growing problem of AIDS daily the unemployment rate is near seventy per cent. PIH seeks out those that specialize in the healthcare field and put them on a payroll. They also find people to train and hire as community healthcare workers. In addition to making progress towards a more solid infrastructure PIH also provides jobs to the poor people in the communities that do not have jobs. The type of people that PIH look for are those that have a strong sense of community that are willing to work to strengthen their community and its conditions, thus enhancing its infrastructure. PIH also has gotten some negative feedback from people who argue that such work should be done strictly on a volunteer basis. While in many cases this holds true, in many areas the people are so poor that they would not be able to go on living if they volunteered instead of getting hourly wages, rations of food, or access to education systems for their work. The community healthcare workers have taken a different and somewhat controversial approach to the treatment of AIDS. Since HIV medication needs to be taken for life, many people in the late stages of the disease are bed ridden and cannot make it out to the clinics to receive the proper medication. As a solution to the problem, the community healthcare workers visit the homes of the sick and bring the medication to them. The visiting of the suffering by the healthcare workers also exemplifies solidarity because many of the community healthcare workers are living with AIDS themselves. Some patients who might be uncomfortable with the fact that they have the virus and someone is going to come and visit them feel much better when someone who is also infected brings them their medication; it builds solidarity in the sense that the people who need the medicine delivered do not have to feel like they are alone in their struggle. The community-based treatment also works well because it seeks out those in need to present them with information that will help with their treatment. PIH has chosen to with this approach because if they were to just set up a clinic and announced their presence they would not have a very high success rate. Many might be turned off by it or might not even know that they were sick until they experienced the worst of the HIV symptoms. Still others may be too poor and too busy to find the time or the money to seek out help on their own. Through the work that PIH does with their healthcare institutions in different poor countries such as Rwanda and Haiti, people that are infected with the virus have found that their lives have significantly improved due to the newfound information and the friendliness and solidarity found within the communities by their fellow citizens and also by the PIH professionals. PIH uses such success stories as these to appeal to the World Health Organization and other such groups for financial aid in expanding their work and making the fiscal spending on such projects more liberal. Many organizations are tough to convince but PIH is confident that by the continuing successes of their many branches that they can convince the world that what they deal with is a serious issue and there should be more matters done to insure the continued success and the ultimate alleviation of suffering from curable communicable diseases in countries where the resources are limited to where adequate funding for treatment is lacking.