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In some ways, Thurman says, it feels as if the International AIDS Trust
has come home too.
Although IAT was never officially connected
to the RSPH before, Thurman has worked on the front lines of the AIDS
battle from the earliest days of the epidemic with many researchers and
physicians now associated with the RSPH and Emory.
"I've felt close to Rollins for a long
time. I've known Jim Curran from the early days of the epidemic, when
he was head of the CDC's AIDS program. There's not another dean of a major
U.S. school of public health with his expertise in HIV and AIDS. AIDS
is extremely complex because of all the underlying co-factors that exacerbate
this disease. And Jim ‘got it' way before anyone else seemed to,"
she says. "In fact, we have many people here at Rollins who were
part of the history of learning to deal with AIDS and have so much to
share with people around the world. I see the International AIDS Trust
and Rollins as a great match."
Ties to AID
Atlanta
How
did this Mercer University graduate who, in her words, once assumed she'd
do some social work, get married, and have kids, wind up in mid-life as
one of the world's leading experts on AIDS issues, traveling around the
world working with leaders like Clinton, British Prime Minister Tony Blair,
President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, and former President Nelson Mandela
of South Africa? And how did she gain the expertise, knowledge, and passion
to help change U.S. policy to encompass HIV as a global problem?
Thurman's involvement with AIDS evolved
from events she confronted in her personal life. Her father was diagnosed
with cancer in the early l980s. "I became involved with hospice when
we learned his illness was terminal, and we made the decision to keep
him at home, where he died in l981," she recalls.
Her dad had worked in the garment industry,
and her mother, a lawyer, was active in the arts. So Thurman grew up knowing
people who worked in fashion, theater, and the arts, many of whom were
gay. About the same time her father died of cancer, several of her gay
friends were stricken with a mysterious illness associated with swollen
lymph glands, Kaposi's sarcoma, and a rare lung infection diagnosed as
Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia. They were some of the first people
in Atlanta with the disease that would eventually be called AIDS.
"Both the fashion and art communities
were hit very hard early on," says Thurman. It was a time when victims
were too often ignored, shunned, and even abandoned. Thurman volunteered
to do respite care and, using the skills she'd acquired during her father's
illness, taught people how to tend the sick and homebound.
In the mid-l980s, Thurman became a volunteer
at AID Atlanta, a community-based nonprofit organization providing health
and support services to people living with HIV/AIDS. By l988, her drive
and commitment had landed her a full-time position there as director of
policy and development; less than a year later she was named executive
director. Long involved with fund raising for other nonprofit health organizations,
her fund-raising and management savvy soon turned then-faltering AID Atlanta
into a viable organization. In fact, under her leadership, AID Atlanta
tripled in size, becoming a multimillion dollar, direct-service agency
with 90 staff members and more than 1,000 volunteers.
Did Thurman know at that point AIDS would
become her life's work? "Absolutely not," she answers. "I
really thought, as most of us did, that the epidemic would be over in
a few years, that science would find an answer. I never dreamed I would
still be doing this work 20 years later."
The AIDS czar
At the height of the epidemic, Thurman noted that many AID Atlanta
social workers were suffering from burnout. "I would pull them off
the front lines for a while to give them a little rest. Then I realized
I was beginning to experience some of the same symptoms, so I knew I needed
a break," she says.
She discussed her concerns with the chairman
of AID Atlanta's board, William Foege, co-founder and executive director
of the Task Force for Child Survival and Development. Foege, now Emeritus
Presidential Distinguished Professor of International Health at the RSPH,
suggested a change. Thurman could work with him as Task Force director
of advocacy programs. Although she continued to serve on the AID Atlanta
board, she accepted the new position and, from l993 to l996, focused on
health problems of children internationally, including immunization and
the eradication of polio. "This was my first work in the global arena,
and I couldn't have had a better mentor than Bill Foege," Thurman
says.
Her career would go down another serendipitous
fork in the road when close friend and Democratic Party strategist James
Carville asked her to serve as political director for Bill Clinton during
the Georgia primary campaign. She accepted and wrote some of Clinton's
first briefing papers on HIV and AIDS in l992. President Clinton was impressed
and, after his election, Thurman went to work for him as director of Citizen
Exchange Programs in the U.S. Information Agency. In l997, Clinton asked
her to become director of National AIDS Policy—the country's AIDS
"czar."
"There were only two czars in the United
States at that time, for AIDS and drugs, positions created to coordinate
all the organizations working in a particular arena. I describe it as
sort of like herding cats," she says. "I took the job with one
caveat—we had to include global AIDS in the portfolio. They agreed,
and we moved the Office of National AIDS Policy out of the Domestic Policy
Council and put it under the President."
Working with myriad government organizations,
including the CDC, NIH, and the State and Justice departments, Thurman
made sure the United States was placing AIDS in an international context.
And she convinced President Clinton that AIDS was fast becoming a global
crisis. The result was that Thurman was responsible for a change in U.S.
policy.
"One of the things I still find staggering
is that before I arrived at the White House, U.S. government funding for
global AIDS programs had been about $125 million a year under both the
former Bush administration and the Clinton administration," she says.
But once Thurman retooled the office to focus on global AIDS and got the
attention of the President and senior staff, over a two-year period, funding
for global AIDS programs tripled and the LIFE Initiative, the first global
multisector approach to fighting HIV and AIDS, was created. "Finally,
AIDS was becoming recognized as an economic issue, a justice issue, a
gender issue, and a stability and security issue. And then we went out
and got Congress to fund this new platform," she says.
In l999, at President Clinton's request,
Thurman accompanied a bipartisan group including members of Congress,
their staff, and philanthropists to see firsthand the impact of AIDS on
the African continent. "When we got home, we sent a report to Congress
outlining what we saw, and it was not very hard at all to get them to
go along with our recommendations," she comments.
IAT is born
After Clinton left office, the International AIDS Trust was created to
privatize and continue many of the same programs developed under that
administration's AIDS office. Clinton has remained involved, co-chairing
the IAT board with Mandela. "IAT works with leaders in government,
civil society, and faith-based institutions to develop innovative and
sustainable approaches to dealing with the underlying co-factors that
exacerbate the spread of HIV: poverty, gender inequity, access to education
[particularly for girls], access to economic opportunity, and human rights,"
Thurman explains. "We garner and develop leadership at the very top
levels all the way down to the grass roots. For example, we were funded
by the Gates Foundation to create an organization of African First Ladies
Against AIDS, which is very successful and active all over the continent."
The focus of IAT has changed in the past
couple of years, she adds, particularly in the developing world where
the majority of those infected and affected are women and a large portion
of health care is delivered by faith-based institutions. IAT is working
to mobilize and equip women and religious leaders to deal with the AIDS
epidemic, especially in the poorest parts of the world where the only
infrastructure is often the religious institution.
Thurman is exploring ways for the
IAT and the RSPH to work together. "At Emory, we have the folks at
Rollins who are highly experienced in working with AIDS, and we also have
the Candler School of Theology and The Carter Center. Plus CARE and the
CDC are located in Atlanta, which is quite a hub for public health. We
are talking about ways to partner and use resources we have here and some
we have overseas to put together programs that draw on the strengths of
the history of IAT and the history of Rollins," Thurman says.
In the early days of AID Atlanta, 20% of Thurman's
staff was infected with HIV, and most have since died. Today, thanks to
antiretroviral therapies, AIDS is no longer a near automatic death sentence,
at least in the United States. The epidemic, however, is devastating millions
of lives in other parts of the world. There is urgency in Thurman's voice
when she relates the facts.
"It is a nightmare on the African continent,
with women and children being hit the hardest now. The second highest
rate of infection is in the Caribbean, right at our own back door. The
fastest-rising rates of infection are in the former Soviet Union and Eastern
Europe. We have an epidemic that has swept the globe in large part while
we were sort of twiddling our thumbs," she says. "And it is
true we now have treatment, but the fact is the places where AIDS hits
hardest are where people are living on a dollar, maybe two, a day. Drugs
are still beyond the reach of the majority of people who need them."
Hope amid
despair
Thurman will continue to travel in her work, most often to Africa and
Asia. Every six weeks, she travels to Limuru, Kenya, where she's pursuing
a master's degree in theology at Saint Paul's United Theological College.
"My colleagues at Rollins have been
very supportive of this," she notes. "I'll be working with women's
groups and faith leaders while I'm there, too, to help them talk openly
about AIDS to build an effective response."
With 40 million people infected with HIV
worldwide and 14,000 people becoming infected every day, how does Thurman
keep up her hope and passion for fighting AIDS?
"Whenever I feel down or like whining,
I just think of Bernadette, a 72-year-old grandmother in Uganda who has
lost 11 of her 12 kids to AIDS and is caring for 35 grandchildren, five
of whom are infected. She received $50 through a micro-lending program
and with a group of other grandmothers started a business, growing vegetables
and raising chickens. She has her five infected grandchildren on meds,
and most of her grandkids are in school. And she's not unusual.
"When I go out into the communities
and actually see the extraordinary work being done by ordinary people
on the ground every day, people who have nothing, giving whatever they
can to people who have less, it is so inspiring to me. I see hope every
place I go in the midst of all this despair."
Sherry Baker is a freelance
writer in Atlanta.
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