Jennifer Furin, MD, PhD spent 2006 launching a new treatment project to bring HIV/AIDS care to people living in rural Lesotho, a small and impoverished mountain nation located in Southern Africa. Nearly a third of the population has HIV, making Lesotho one of the highest prevalence countries in the world. Fewer than 10 percent of patients who need treatment receive it. The joint Partners In Health/ Brigham and Women’s Hospital/ Francois Xavier Bagnoud Center/Clinton Foundation project that Dr. Furin is leading will bring care to the most remote parts of the country, where there are no roads and which are only accessible by single-engine Cessna plane. Dr. Furin and her team have made quick progress. After just six months of planning and preparation, the project started seeing patients in July. Already, over 700 patients have been tested for HIV; over 500 HIV patients are being monitored; 170 are on antiretroviral treatment; and 70 community health workers have been trained. Tuberculosis treatment is being scaled up as well, in response to extremely high infection rates, with more than 90 patients being treated. The Lesotho project will be expanded to eight new sites in the country in 2007.

Dr. Furin’s research focuses on the qualitative components of compliance with MDR-TB therapy. An expert on the social roots of infectious diseases, she conducts training, consultation and research on the application of qualitative and ethnographic methods to management of complex health interventions in resource-poor settings. She is responsible for the design and oversight of several ethnographic studies in community-based management of HIV and MDR-TB.

Dr. Furin received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1995 and her MD from Harvard Medical School in 1999. She completed the Internal Medicine residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in 2001, followed by advanced training in Infectious Diseases at Case Western Reserve University.