Africa Infectious Disease Village Clinics

Africa Infectious Disease Village Clinics’ (AID Village Clinics’) mission is to improve the health and quality of life for people living in rural African villages by providing free, timely, and accurate disease diagnosis, treatment, and prevention, and health care education.

The people we serve — some 90,000 indigenous Maasai and members of other tribes, scattered across 1,400 square miles of southeast rural Kenya — lack basic human necessities. There is no running water or electricity, no roads, schools, or sanitary facilities.

Despite these conditions, we have brought modern medicine to the area. Each month, four Kenyan physicians and more than 100 Kenyan health care workers and support staff, see an average of 2,300 patients at our Mbirikani Clinic southeast of Nairobi, at our mobile clinic, and through our traveling outreach workers. We treat patients who suffer from HIV/AIDS and its opportunistic infections (tuberculosis, cryptococcal meningitis, PCP pneumonia), malaria, upper respiratory infections, typhoid fever, various topical infections, and injuries.

For the more than 5,900 HIV-positive individuals we identified, AID Village Clinics is now helping 2,800 to get lifesaving anti-retroviral therapy and other support, including home care and prevention of mother-to-child transmission.

The Mbirikani Clinic includes a 20-bed inpatient unit, a pharmacy, an x-ray facility and Voluntary Counseling and Testing Center, and a state-of-the-art laboratory that performs basic hematology and chemistry exams, microscopic exams for malaria and other bacterial infections, and sputum testing, CD4 and viral loads for HIV/AIDS patients. Our outreach program is staffed by 16 community health workers who travel on motorcycles, providing follow-up care as well as preventive services, including distributing condoms, mosquito nets, Similac, and water purification and nutritional supplements, and installing latrines.