Salma Kikwete, the wife of the president of Tanzania, Jakaya Kikwete, has been in New York discussing Weill Cornell Medical College's (WCMC) aim of helping to create the best medical facility in East Africa.

Earlier this year, WCMC signed an affiliation with Bugando Medical Center and Bugando University's College of Health Sciences in Mwanza, Tanzania. Now, WCMC's Division of International Medicine and Infectious Diseases plans to begin training health professionals in Tanzania by sending senior residents in internal medicine and pediatrics as well as postdoctoral fellows to Bugando by January 2007.

The collaboration is being led in part by Sanford I. Weill, chairman of Weill Cornell's Board of Overseers and retired chairman of Citigroup; Dr. Peter Le Jacq of the Maryknoll Brothers and Sisters; and Dr. Estomih Mtui, associate professor of clinical anatomy in neurology and neuroscience at WCMC. During its first year, half of the funding for Weill Cornell's participation in the affiliation will be supported by the TOUCH Foundation, an organization that has evolved over the last nine years specifically to address Tanzania's health-care needs.

"This is a program that we envision extending beyond internal medicine and pediatrics. It will eventually involve the basic sciences as well as other clinical departments," said Dr. Warren Johnson, chief of international medicine and infectious diseases at WCMC. "This is not just an AIDS program; it will deal with comprehensive health issues there. But AIDS and HIV are so pervasive that you cannot seriously consider any type of health education and service program without looking at AIDS, tuberculosis and other associated diseases."

Worldwide, 40 million people have HIV/AIDS; 64 percent live in sub-Saharan Africa. In Tanzania, for example, 8.8 percent of the adults, or 1.6 million people, had HIV/AIDS in 2003, 100,000 children are infected and 2 million children are AIDS orphans.

In New York, Salma Kikwete and the WCMC group discussed Weill Cornell's most prominent international HIV/AIDS outreach program, GHESKIO (Groupe Haitien d'Etudes du Sarcome de Kaposi et des Infections Opportunistes), which was founded in Haiti in 1981, during the first years of the AIDS epidemic. It was only the second center in the world at that time dedicated to the study of AIDS and began with just one physician and one technician. Under the direction of Dr. Jean Pape and Johnson, GHESKIO has grown to more than 300 physicians, technicians, fellows, residents and students working in Haiti, providing anti-retroviral drugs to patients and conducting clinical trials with AIDS vaccines and novel combination therapies. A principal focus has been on decreasing transmission rates in several different areas, including perinatal transmissions.

"We can take the lessons that we've learned at GHESKIO and try to develop programs with the college in Bugando to see how we can help contribute to this as well as some of the other major health issues," said Johnson.

"For me, as a Tanzanian and as a part of Weill Cornell, I am most pleased and privileged to contribute to this relationship," said Mtui, speaking to the first lady and the assembled audience in both Swahili and English. "Truly we are making progress and combating disease on the continent."

Gabriel Miller is a writer with Weill Cornell Medical College's Office of Public Affairs.