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Stone traveled to Boston to receive the Harvard Foundation’s 2005 Humanitarian Award and to deliver the annual Peter J. Gomes Humanitarian Lecture at Memorial Church on the Cambridge campus. The lecture was created to honor the life and work of Harvard Foundation founder Rev. Professor Peter Gomes. Previous recipients have included Desmond Tutu, Elie Wiesel, and James Earl Jones. At the HSPH meeting, Stone sat at a table with five students and fellows from the HSPH AIDS Initiative. The discussion, led by Max Essex, chair of the Initiative, allowed participants to share their experiences in AIDS prevention. Stone said that she was first touched by what would become the AIDS epidemic when the syndrome was still known as GRID (gay-related immunodeficiency disease). A model and fledgling actress at the time, Stone watched the illness run rampant through the fashion and movie-making industries. "HIV/AIDS has been a big monster all of my adult life," she said, referring to friends she has lost to the syndrome. Stone currently chairs the American Foundation for AIDS Research Campaign (amFAR).
Research has projected that life expectancy in some southern Africa countries could plummet from 70 to 30 years within the next four decades if major anti-AIDS actions, such as making treatments widely available and affordable, are not taken, asserted Essex. Doctoral student Pride Chigwedere described how his efforts as a physician in Zimbabwe were thwarted by the epidemic. The death toll at his hospital became so high that his job as a physician became akin to that of a coroner. "My job became one to certify people as dead," he remembered. "We would tell families of the deceased for whom we did everything we could, when in fact we had been able to do nothing [because of the lack of treatments]." At HSPH, Chigwedere is exploring the role of antiretroviral drugs in controlling the AIDS epidemic. Other HSPH students, all of whom were from Africa, described their work, including Claire Moffat, who is researching mother-to-infant transmission; Irene Koulinska, who is studying HIV transmission through breast milk; and Joseph Nkolola and Wambui Waruingi, both of whom are working on vaccine development. A reception followed the meeting, at which Stone was presented with a beaded "AIDS Ribbon" pendant made by HIV-infected women in Botswana. Harvard Public Health NOW is published biweekly by the Office of Communications Harvard School of Public Health 665 Huntington Ave., SPH 1-1312 Boston, Massachusetts 02115 617-432-6052 Editor and Layout: Christina Roache Contributing Writer: Paula Hartman Cohen, Carol Cruzan Morton Photos Credits: Suzanne Camarata, Hilarie Cranmer, R. Moresky, Graham Ramsay Archived Issues || HSPH Home Copyright, 2009, President and Fellows of Harvard College |
