US Doctors Look to Africa for Lower-Cost Treatments

Developing nations offer cheap, effective solutions for health care

By Jason Farago, Newser Staff

Posted Jul 2, 2009 6:33 AM CDT

(Newser) – When an AIDS clinic at the University of Alabama wanted to boost the number of patients who returned for treatment, they didn't look to programs in the rich West for ideas. They went to Zambia, where strategies for treating patients with HIV have succeeded despite widespread poverty. With US health care costs through the roof, American doctors are increasingly looking to Africa for cost-effective medical practices, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Doctors say that if Americans can overcome the stigma of accepting less expensive treatments, solutions from developing nations could succeed here. "We're building Cadillacs, and they're offering us VW Beetles," says one skeptic, but a strategy pioneered in Haiti, using community health workers to do outreach to AIDS patients, cut medical expenses for a group of Boston patients by 40%. Low-cost technologies developed in the US are often not available here, the Journal adds, because they may be slightly less accurate. "In the developing world, people are willing to make the tradeoff in accuracy for simplicity and low cost," says a doc who works for Bill Clinton's foundation.

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A patient received treatment at a clinic in Durban, South Africa in October 2005. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe)

An activist holds a red ribbon, the symbol of AIDS awareness, during a march marking World AIDS Day in Saint Marc, Haiti, Sunday, Nov. 30, 2008. (AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa)

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We learned from Africa that in a very resource-limited setting, you can do very effective chronic care delivery. These are models we can learn a lot from. - Mark Dybul, President Bush's AIDS policy coordinator

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US Doctors Look to Africa for Lower-Cost Treatments