Mitchell Besser founded a lifesaving program to support pregnant women and new mothers infected with the virus.
Mitchell Besser, a Harvard-educated obstetrician and gynecologist with decades of experience, learned an uncomfortable truth about the limits of medicine 15 years ago when he began working with expectant mothers in South Africa: In a country where nearly a third of women of childbearing age are HIV-positive, being a doctor wasn’t always enough to make a lasting difference in his patients’ lives. “I didn’t have anything other than the white coat to give instructions,” he says. “The white coat is not powerful to change people’s behavior.”
All too often, women arrived for prenatal visits, learned they were HIV-positive and, fearing stigma, never returned for follow-up care, jeopardizing their own lives and those of their newborns. Pediatric AIDS is largely preventable via antiretroviral drugs, but mother-to-child HIV transmission rates remain high in sub-Saharan Africa. Dr. Besser, 60, saw that HIV-positive women who got treated could help fill a dangerous gap.
"The mothers who had been in my care knew everything they needed to know and could provide support to mothers just like them,” he says. “They were able to translate their personal experiences to other mothers.”
That insight became the foundation of mothers2mothers, a peer-to-peer, community-based organization that Dr. Besser started in Cape Town in 2001. Funded by government, corporate, foundation and private sources, the program trains and employs HIV-positive mothers to serve alongside doctors and nurses, advising and supporting pregnant women and new mothers infected with the virus.
Now, nearly 1,100 “Mentor Mothers” are employed in six sub-Saharan African countries; they have reached more than 1.2 million HIV-positive women since 2001. “We take people out of the victim role, and they come back with strength,” Dr. Besser says.
In all six countries where the organization operates, mothers2mothers’ rate of antiretroviral treatment for pregnant women is higher than overall national rates, and lifesaving prophylaxis for infants occurs more often, the group says. The program model has been so successful that Kenya made it a formal part of its national health system in 2012. Dr. Besser has also adapted the model for a new program in which seniors check on other seniors in their communities.
Dr. Besser, a Philadelphia native, first visited South Africa as a high school exchange student and returned in college to volunteer in a mission hospital. His work there has changed others’ lives—and his own. In 2009, he met singer Annie Lennox in Cape Town when she visited mothers2mothers as part of her own charitable work. Three years later, she became his second wife.
This article was originally published on 26-12-2014 on The Wall Street Journal
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