My first trip to Haiti with Paul was enlightening. It is difficult to describe adequately what he and Jim and a growing group of colleagues have done. In Haiti Paul, not only built a hospital, but he loves to... to describe himself as a gardener of great tenacity. Haiti is a country that has been completely despoiled. It is the most barren country I've ever been in, in... on any continent and I've been on, on all. The tree... the, the setting around the hospital, the first hospital that Paul built is... that hospital is surrounded by trees, by gardens and by people who are working in them. I mention that the, the people who have been trained as community health workers are paid members of the organization, but also in the organization are people who tend to the, to the grounds, people who are responsible for helping to find food for the hospital.
Paul and Jim have really redefined public health. In the days when I first was associated with people who were dealing with problems in third world settings, it wasn't uncommon for a group of deeply committed people to go to a place where there was an epidemic of malaria or of tuberculosis or of tropical illness of some kind, help identify the source of the problem, help treat the patients and then come back to this country. Paul and Jim's focus is on poverty, primarily. The diseases associated with poverty are the consequence, in most instances, of the poverty. Of course, they treat malaria with the appropriate drugs. They treat tuberculosis, as I've just mentioned, with appropriate drugs. But, they also treat these problems with food, with clean water, with education and with efforts to find jobs.
Paul - very early on in all of these places research is carried and I'll say a bit more about that in just a minute - but, one of the early studies Paul did in Haiti was to take two groups of patients with tuberculosis. He treated both with appropriate drugs, this was the, the drug, this was tuberculosis that responds to the primary drugs that are used for it; he treated one, both groups with the appropriate drugs and one group with milk as well, and I don't have to state, I'm sure, which group did very much better. Applied research of that kind is a very important part of the work that Paul and Jim encourage.
