By Edward Chiao
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
[email protected]
 www.doctorswithoutborders.org
A doctor examines a child at the Hospicio San Jose centre in
Guatemala.
Doctors Without Borders, one of the world’s largest
independent medical relief agencies, is coming to UCLA ““ in a
48-foot tractor-trailer.
The non-profit humanitarian group is hauling its “Access
to Essential Medicines EXPO” exhibit to UCLA for a three-day
stop in Westwood Plaza, hosted by the UCLA School of Public
Health.
The interactive exhibit, which opens July 9, is free to all
visitors and will highlight the lack of essential medicines
available to treat five serious diseases afflicting different
regions of the world.
“We created this exhibit because our doctors have been
going to developing countries seeing people who are seriously sick,
and we’ve been failing to treat them,” said Loma Chiu,
the West Coast press officer with Doctors Without Borders and a
volunteer with the tour.
“We want the exhibit to speak out to the public to make
them aware that we lack affordable, effective medicines,” she
added.
Visitors start at the exhibition’s entrance tent, where
they spin the “Wheel of Misfortune,” and are assigned
one of five diseases ““ Kala Azar (fever, swelling of liver
and spleen, and anemia), sleeping sickness (fever, convulsions,
signs of mental illness), malaria, tuberculosis or HIV/AIDS.
“By “˜diagnosing’ you with a disease, we are
helping you to imagine the realities of millions around the
world,” Chiu said.
Visitors then walk through the exhibit, learning about their
diseases through photographs, audio and video aids, and personal
testimonies of patients living with the disease. Visitors also
learn about the symptoms of the diseases and the regions where they
are most prevalent.
“For most people with these diseases, either the medicines
are too expensive, too old to be effective, or not available at
all,” Chiu said.
“We can’t treat these sick people, so now our
mandate is to speak out and make others aware of this problem from
our Access to Essential Medicines campaign,” she added.
Once they are finished with the exhibit, visitors meet with
volunteer nurses and doctors for a medical consultation. The
medical staff asks the patient several questions and provide a
diagnosis for the visitors’ diseases, along with an estimate
for their chances of receiving proper treatment.
“What we’re trying to do is give students
perspective ““ not to make them feel guilty about what they
might not have known existed,” said Brigg Reilly, a Los
Angeles-based epidemiologist. “It’s a problem not many
people know about, but it’s not their fault.”
As one of the medics giving the consultations, Reilly has worked
as a field volunteer with Doctors Without Borders for six
years.
The response from visitors on previous tour stops around the
country has been receptive, according to Reilly.
The World Health Organization reports one child dies of malaria
every 30 seconds, killing two million people annually.
Equally deadly is tuberculosis, and 98 percent of the two
million people who die each year from tuberculosis are from poor
countries, according to statistics from WHO.
Doctors Without Borders has over 3,000 field doctors and nurses
working in poor countries to treat these diseases, Chiu said.
“There’s a market failure in leading countries
because these diseases mainly affect poor countries, and
there’s no money to be made in researching cures for these
diseases,” Reilly said.
“It’s also a public policy failure, because the
government could do more to give the industry more incentive to
research these diseases. But unfortunately, all we see are popular
lifestyle drugs like Viagra and Nexium (heartburn
medication),” Reilly added.
One disease which does impact the United States is HIV/AIDS.
Between 1980 and 1999, there were 430,441 deaths from HIV/AIDS or
3.7 percent of all cases worldwide, according to a Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention HIV/AIDS Surveillance Report in
1999.
The report also estimates worldwide, 18,800,000 people have died
from HIV/AIDS, with 72 percent of HIV/AIDS cases existing in
Africa, and 18 percent in Asia.
Unlike malaria and tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS research is prevalent
in the United States, where 90 percent of the world’s new
medicines are researched and developed, according to Chiu.
“The message is there are solutions to getting the drugs
developed and getting them into the hands of people who need
them,” Reilly said.
When visitors exit the exhibit, they can sign a petition
requesting that “more be done to stimulate the research and
development of treatments for neglected diseases.”
The petition will then be delivered to the U.S. government and
the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America in March
2003, when the Access EXPO will complete its U.S. tour in
Washington, D.C.
The tour started last March in New York. Los Angeles is the
eighth stop en route to 30 cities across the nation.
Doctors Without Borders started in 1971 and has over 15,000
volunteers worldwide, according to Chiu. In 1999, the group
received the Nobel Peace Prize for worldwide humanitarian work.