The year I turned eleven, my uncle Josiah Ssesanga was admitted to a hospital in Uganda with meningitis. It was 1994, and he was HIV-positive. Between him and death stood a tattered postwar health system.
Treatments for HIV and AIDS existed in other parts of the world, but they were mostly limited in Uganda to those used in clinical trials. For my uncle’s particular infection – cryptococcal meningitis – there was a drug called fluconazole. But he didn’t know it existed; regardless, he wouldn’t have been able to afford it – and even among patients who took it only 12% survived beyond six months.
The day after his admission, “people from some American project” arrived with a mountain of paperwork, my aunt remembers. They were doing a clinical trial testing a more effective combination therapy.
