I was lucky to have a little break in Thailand between my last job at PwC in Tokyo working on sustainable international business deals, in particular inclusive busine feasibility studies, and my new job at the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI). For self-promotion purposes and those that want to know, my understanding of the job is described below.
My title is Country Support Analyst for the Labratory Services Team with the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI). CHAI is an arm of the Clinton Foundation. Within CHAI I’m working on a Multi Drug Resistant Turbeculosis program that aims to reduce deaths caused by TB and MDR-TB in Africa, which when combined with HIV is the biggest killer in sub-saharan Africa.
TB treatments have been around for a long time but have never been accessible enough to eradicate TB completely or even reduce the problem to a manageable level. Making matters worse the TB bacteria has evolved and there is a growing number of cases where the best drugs are no longer effective. They call this new bacteria Multiple Drug Resistant TB (MDR-TB).
The MDR-TB program at CHAI aims to save lives by increasing sustainable access to diagnosis and treatment. How?
Firstly through improved information and data on TB cases, leading to greater visibility of demand for Diagnostics, leading to lower prices for diagnostic machines and greater procurement and then use. More diagnosis will lead to greater visibility of infection rates, more stable demand and ordering process and reduced drug prices, reinforcing greater access to treatment and diagnosis. Essentially, once diagnosis is improved, treatment is a circular process that gets cheaper and cheaper as the number of patients increases. The problem to be addressed is therefore identifying the patients in the first place, providing some financing to assist with initial drug procurement and then helping improve the processes as it starts to repeat. Perhaps an analogy that would work is that we are push-starting a car that has a flat battery, once it is going, the battery will charge via the alternator and keep the car going. In the analogy the car is the diagnosis, the battery is the treatment and the passengers are the patients.
The program currently covers South Africa, Swaziland, Lesotho, Ethiopia, Ukraine, India and Vietnam, for various reasons. its likely other countries will be added, possibly Uganda, Zimbabwe and Mozambique. Being in the lab services team my focus for the first few months is going to be on helping countries use the data to determine procurement and roll-out strategies for diagnostics. As a country support analyst it seems it will be my role to ensure that countries are kept up-to date with findings from other teams in CHAI (e.g., procurement details, new diagnostic tool development updates, scientific advice, etc) as well as sharing information on each country between countries where relevant. It involves a lot of travel.