“ICAP’s Wafaa El-Sadr was at the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic from day one, pioneering comprehensive care programs as a physician at Harlem Hospital in the 1980s. ‘The most important lesson I learned from my work in Harlem was not to take no for an answer,’ she says of naysayers who insisted people in the community wouldn’t participate in her programs (and were proven wrong). She encountered similar resistance in Africa. ‘People said, ‘Poor people won’t come, they won’t take their meds and they’ll sell them,” she says. Yet El-Sadr persisted, successfully collaborating with government agencies, NGOs, and community organizations to bring aid to everyone in need, including migrants and prisoners.”
This article was featured in the Apple App Store on World AIDS Day, December 1 2019.
