Non-profit volunteers help to fight tuberculosis in the slums of Peru
Home to the highest rates of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis in the Americas, there are at least 30,000 people living in Peru infected with the ancient disease that killed 1.8 million globally last year – more than AIDS-related and malaria deaths combined.
Despite being a curable disease, tuberculosis still thrives in the poorest corners of the world.
In places like Villa Esperanza, or Village of Hope, a neighborhood in Carabayllo – one of the poorest districts in Peru’s capital, Lima – where clusters of pastel-colored homes cling to dusty hills, the problem is inadequate health services to help patients follow through with treatment, which takes six months to a couple years.
But a low-budget pilot program that aims to eradicate tuberculosis from these parts of the world is now slowly changing the lives of patients in the slums of Peru.
Partners in Health (PIH), a Boston-based non-profit that works with Peru’s health ministry, offers a simple solution. It trains community volunteers to tend to tuberculosis patients in their homes, making sure they take medicine daily and helping them navigate the public health bureaucracy.
The volunteers, nearly all women already active in the community, have proven better at finding people with tuberculosis than white-coated health professionals, said Dr. Leonid Lecca, executive director of PIH in Peru.
A 61-year-old volunteer, Guadalupe Quispe has already treated some eight patients in her neighborhood, where the stigma of tuberculosis can cost people jobs and relationships.
The position does not pay, but Quispe said it has other rewards. She recounts the story of a previous patient of hers, a young woman who was coughing up blood. She persuaded the woman to get treatment as she would have likely died otherwise.
After getting better, the young woman was able to go back to school and is now a nurse.
So far, no tuberculosis patient in PIH’s year-and-a-half-old program has dropped out, a key challenge in slowing the spread of drug-resistant forms of tuberculosis that result from unfinished treatment, said Lecca.
One in four patients in the Andean country give up on treatment because the medicine needed to kill the bacteria have such harrowing side effects, Lecca said.”Some medicines change the color of your skin, some cause bouts of psychosis,” Lecca said. “Patients need to be accompanied through this process.”
One patient, William Campos, 49, is now halfway through his treatment and is starting to imagine a healthy life again. “I used to cry constantly. The pain was so unbearable. I even thought about killing myself. But thanks to Mrs. Guadalupe I have hope to push through this,” said Campos.
