Educate and inspire your loved ones
Gift ideas for all occasions

Looking for gifts that will make an impression on your loved ones and make a difference in the lives of poor patients? Here are a few suggestions for special gifts that will support the work of Partners In Health 

From Paul Farmer and Ophelia Dahl
A holiday message

Partners In Health co-founders Paul Farmer and Ophelia Dahl reflect on a year of accomplishments and the challenges the organization faces for the coming year.

Read the letter

World AIDS Day 2008:
PIH partners celebrate with speeches, song, dance, and solidarity

	Dancers at World AIDS Day Youth Forum workshop in Rwanda

Almost three decades after the emerging AIDS pandemic became widely recognized, staff and community members at Partners In Health sites around the world celebrated the achievements they and others have made in combating the spread and deadliness of the disease. December 1 was the twentieth annual observance of World AIDS Day, a day dedicated to raising awareness and mobilizing action to fight a disease that more than 33 million people are now living with, and that has killed more than 25 million people. The events at PIH sites stressed not only how far the fight against AIDS has come, but how far it still has to go.  

House of Hope:
A new home and family for children orphaned by AIDS and tuberculosis

	Former orphans wave good-bye to their new mother before heading to school in Lesotho.

The little girl's name literally meant "Help me" in her native language, and it was clear to Dr. Hind Satti of PIH Lesotho that she and her two younger sisters needed help.

"It was painful to see them, the wind was so freezing, they were so hungry... [Their clothes] hardly covered their little bodies," Hind recalled. The three girls, who range in age from 10 to 6 years old, had lost their mother to tuberculosis. With no one to care for them, the sisters were forced to beg for food in their village.

Unfortunately, their situation is far from unique. The pandemics of HIV/AIDS and multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) threaten to wipe out a generation of adults across Africa, orphaning millions of children in the process. Read about PIH Lesotho's new program to help these three sisters and other orphans like them. 

PIH's 15th annual Thoams J. White Symposium focused on the theme "Pushing boundaries: past, present, and future." The program featured a panel of HIV patients who shared their stories of being provided with life-saving antiretroviral drugs thanks. Another panel featured activists who have used the PIH model and philosophy of social justice to create their own programs to provide healthcare to the poor and inspire the next generation of social justice activists. View these panels as well as speeches from PIH co-founders Paul Farmer and Ophelia Dahl. 

To fight malaria, APZU blankets district in bednets

A child joins the effort to distribute bednets in the Neno District of Malawi.

Last year, the impoverished Neno District of Malawi reported more than 52,000 cases of malaria. The disease was responsible for hundreds of deaths – most of them children – and was the most common diagnosis in the outpatient clinics.

To tackle this deadly disease, PIH’s partner organization in Malawi (APZU) recently launched a campaign to distribute over 26,000 mosquito bednets to households with individuals at most risk of contracting the disease. Read more about this campaign.

Choppers for doctors: Motorcycles help health workers traverse Lesotho's mountains

In Lesotho, it’s difficult to get around. Villages in the mountain kingdom are sometimes accessible only by single-engine propeller aircraft or on horseback. There are often no roads in rural areas and patients must walk hours to clinics, which is extremely difficult for the critically ill, and transporting patients and medical supplies is often an ordeal.

The nonprofit organization Riders for Health is working to help change this by donating ultra-rugged motorcycles for PIH Lesotho staff to use. The vehicles are expected to greatly enhance health-care delivery, allowing health workers to regularly and reliably visit communities previously inaccessible except on foot. Read more

Right to Health Care program brings Haitian boy to Boston for skull surgery
In a cozy, sunny room on the ninth floor of Children’s Hospital in Boston, 11-month-old Dumanel Luxama happily coos and chortles as his father stands beside him. Just a few days earlier, the little Haitian boy had undergone major surgery to prevent brain tissue from bulging through a hole in his skull. Through its Right to Health Care program, PIH has a history of bringing patients who cannot be treated at local sites to larger, better-equipped hospitals in the U.S. and elsewhere. Read more

Socios En Salud honored with two major awards
In recognition of its success in combating MDR-TB and other global health issues, Socios En Salud (PIH's partner organization in Peru) recently accepted two distinguished awards—one from the Carso Institute and the other from the Stop TB Partnership and the Kochon Foundation honoring leaders in the fight against tuberculosis. Read more.

Village Health Works: Healing people and communities in Burundi
In 1993, Deogratias “Deo” Niyizonkiza escaped a civil war in his native country of Burundi, but he couldn’t leave it behind. He was consumed by memories of death and despair, and distraught because he didn’t know whether his family was alive or dead. After meeting PIH co-founder Paul Farmer and learning about the work of PIH firsthand, he finally returned to his home country in 2005 with the goal of opening a free medical clinic in his native village. Read this amazing story

Studies confirm XDR-TB can be cured
Extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) is curable with intensive and specialized care conclude two recent studies published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) and The Lancet. Researchers found that fully 60 percent of the patients enrolled in the studies with XDR-TB were successfully treated and cured.

A year of accomplishments for Lesotho's national multidrug-resistant TB program
In the small mountainous country of Lesotho, patients infected with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) faced almost certain death just one year ago. Today they and their families have reason to hope for a better prognosis. Last July, the first patients enrolled in Lesotho’s national program to treat multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB). PIH Lesotho’s MDR-TB Program Director, Dr. Hind Satti, recently reflected on many successes of the program, which she helped spearhead last July, and the challenges it currently faces.

Partner profile: pedaling for patients
Visiting 16 patients scattered among the rural hills of Malawi not once but twice every day? "No problem!" says one village health worker named Briston Threemunthu. Read Briston's story

Bringing vital skills to operating rooms in Haiti
As a child growing up in Haiti, Marie Myrléne St. Vil Marius decided to dedicate her life “to people who have nothing and are in need.” This commitment was Marie's motivation for becoming a nurse, and later, for leaving the relative comfort of a hospital in the capital city to work at PIH’s partner organization Zanmi Lasante in Haiti’s impoverished Central Plateau. Most recently, it brought Marie to Boston, where she and three colleagues received formal training for operating room nurses that is not offered anywhere in Haiti. Read more

60 Minutes to watch... and a lifetime to act
This May, CBS's 60 Minutes featured a segment on the work of Partners In Health. In case you missed any part of the broadcast, it can be viewed here. If the images you saw and the voices you heard have inspired you, learn more about how you can contribute to PIH's work in Haiti, and the movement for health and social justice around the world.

Rwanda's rural health initiative brings quality care and home visits to Burera
A young, widowed mother of five named Patricie was suffering from both advanced HIV/AIDS and disseminated tuberculosis. So PIH's Dr. Patrick Almazor decided to pay her a visit at her home--a two hour climb up the hills of rural Rwanda. For PIH, such home visits are an integral part our work. There is no substitute for the opportunity to sit with a patient in his or her home in an effort to understand the social, economic, and structural forces that shape lives and contribute to illness. So Dr. Patrick's trek was business as usual. But what made this particular visit special was the fact that it was the first home visit from the new Burera District Hospital. Just a few months ago, there was no hospital and just a handful of health workers to care for Burera's population of nearly 400,000.

PIH news archive