Socios En Salud Surges Forward
Posted by Adam Hanson on March 26th 2008 in Organizations
Recovered TB patient with her family.In August, an earthquake rocked Peru. The quake decimated a large section of Peru along the coast south of Lima. I recently visited a Peruvian organization called Socios En Salud (“Partners In Health” in Spanish) that I wrote about for the Health section of Issue 3. Socios En Salud (SES) is a group of medical professionals who treat tuberculosis and other diseases in Peru. One of its current projects is to treat multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) patients in Pisco, a city south of Lima that was almost totally destroyed by the earthquake. Dr. Jaime Bayona, director of SES in Peru, told me that his staff had needed to reach their patients inside Pisco within 24 hours of the earthquake to insure that they had meds to take. For treatment to succeed, an MDR-TB patient must take antibiotics everyday without fail. Additionally, SES volunteers ventured into the quake zone weekly to address the loss of medical infrastructure in the area. “So many wanted to volunteer in their free time, we had to stop volunteers,” said Dr. Bayona. For months, SES staff continued their work combating disease in poor urban centers of Peru while spending their free time delivering meds and supplies to patients in the rubble of the earthquake zone.
Girls play outside of a school. SES raises money and gathers volunteers to build schools in impoverished areas of Peru.
SES is not only known for treating TB. They have begun to expand their resources to treat those with HIV, train more local health promoters, combat poverty, and make treatment more self-sufficient for communities. In Carabayllo, a province north of Lima where SES first began to treat MDR-TB, their commitment to treating this disease has almost entirely eradicated MDR-TB from the region. They have created pharmacies owned by small communities so that SES staff no longer have to provide meds to those people, and the communities can use the profits to help sustain their own medical care. Now SES staff help to establish schools in the region.
Boy sits overlooking a barrio where SES is fighting disease and the poverty that helps it spread.
Over the past few months, SES has been expanding a great deal to try to combat disease, meet many needs and provide long-term solutions for sick and impoverished people in Peru. This expansion has stretched their limited resources very thin, but SES continues to do what they feel needs to be done to keep people from suffering and dying. They have begun to campaign to try to raise enough Peruvian financial support to match the generous amount of foreign support that they receive.
If you would like to learn more about Socios En Salud’s work in Peru or to find out how you can help, check out www.pih.org and click on the Peru section under “Where We Work.” Also read the Health section of NEED Issue 3.
