Can Farmers success in Haiti be applied to other countries?
I know it can. Let me tell you how I know that: it’s being reproduced in Haiti by leaps and bounds by community health-care workers, who are largely peasants—often former patients or continuing patients. Partners in Health has about 700 of these community health-care workers now in Central Haiti, and they’ve been expanding on the work of Zanmi Lasante by seeing about six or seven patients a day, twice a day. This has all been happening beyond the scope of my book, though I tried to signal it at the end. I just got some recent figures from Farmer. They’ve expanded, reopened, or fixed up a bunch of clinics and hospitals in the Central Plateau, covering about an eighth of Haiti, and they’re still going. They go out into the community and do prevention and health training. Particularly with TB and AIDS, where drug resistance is such an important issue, they do directly observed therapy. In the morning they bring the AIDS medicines to the patients, and they bring them again in the evening,
