28451: Hermantin ( News)NEW BOOK CHRONICLES AIDS IN HAITI (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>

Posted on Sun, Jun. 11, 2006


AIDS
NEW BOOK CHRONICLES AIDS IN HAITI
A University of Miami physician working to improve medical care in Haiti takes 
readers on his 25-year journey through the AIDS epidemic here and in Haiti in a 
new book.
BY JACQUELINE CHARLES
jcharles@MiamiHerald.com

The first time Dr. Arthur Fournier picked up his pen to tell the story of AIDS 
in the Haitian community, in 1991, he put it down. There was no happy ending.

Fast forward 15 years. Though a happy ending remains to be found for the deadly 
disease, Fournier at least has found something today he didn't have then: 
lessons learned.

''Maybe these lessons I've learned have benefits to the public at large,'' 
Fournier, a University of Miami Medical School associate dean, said.

Fournier has chronicled those lessons in a 297-page book, The Zombie Curse, A 
Doctor's 25-year Journey into the Heart of the AIDS Epidemic in Haiti.

'There is a message that needs to be sent: `Science alone isn't going to win 
the war against AIDS or any disease,' '' said Fournier, who plans to use 
proceeds from the book to help support Project Medishare, the UM-affiliated 
charity he founded in 1994 to help improve healthcare among Haiti's poor.

To win the war, Fournier argues, doctors and others have to ``understand the 
politics, the culture and the history . . . coupled with a real bond with the 
people.''

Fournier not only attempts to demonstrate his point by giving readers a guided 
tour of Haiti's slums and rural communities but through the work the charity 
does in Thomonde, a town built on the French village model in Haiti's central 
plateau region.

The town has become a hallmark in Project Medishare's fight not to just provide 
healthcare, but to demonstrate the challenges that doctors, and the Haitian 
people, face in fighting AIDS and other diseases.

To understand the impact of the epidemic -- and the work being done in Haiti -- 
one has to understand the stigmatization of the disease among Haitians.

Fournier begins his journey with a guided tour through the medical corridors of 
Jackson Memorial Hospital in the early 1980s. As the disease spread, Jackson 
became a place where Fournier and others ''saw firsthand the chaos, confusion 
and blame'' associated with the disease, he wrote.

Haitians, who began showing up at Jackson in disproportionate numbers, soon 
became scapegoats, stigmatized as carriers of the virus that causes AIDS.

''We didn't understand the Haitian people, and we had no bond to them,'' 
Fournier said. ``All we had was epidemiology. The only thing we could see they 
had in common was they were from Haiti. Our cultural incompetence at the time 
unfairly stigmatized the Haitian people.''

Fournier concedes that ``guilt played a large amount in pushing me to try and 
get involved in helping in Haiti.''

But Zombie Curse isn't about blame. It's a story about a doctor -- and a small 
charity from Miami struggling to heal poor rural Haitians on a shoestring 
budget of $600,000 annually. It's also about overcoming obstacles in a country 
plagued by violence, political upheaval and superstition.

The book's title speaks to the sometimes-fatalistic attitude many Haitians 
adopt once they find out they have an illness they can't explain.

''We did that here,'' Fournier said. ``We attributed blame to protect ourselves 
from the AIDS epidemic when we didn't understand it. We blamed the victim.''

The third part of the title's metaphor, Fournier said, is the fact that even on 
the 25th anniversary of the emergence of the AIDS epidemic, ``We are 
sleepwalking through the real forces that are driving the prejudice. We are 
never going to be free from those stereotypes and stigmatization until we 
understand the true forces that are driving the infection and are willing to do 
something about them.''