One man's mission
Nurse organizes shipment of surplus AIDS drugs to African patients

By Heather Stringer
January 29, 2001
Photo: African AIDS Network

Lee Wildes, LVN, was on vacation in Tanzania six years ago when he noticed something that disturbed him: Many of the people were gaunt. "Being a nosy nurse, I asked people what was wrong," Wildes said.

He quickly learned that they were infected with AIDS, but were taking only aspirin to treat the illness. The San Francisco resident said he was haunted by the experience.

"It kept bothering me," said Wildes, who is HIV-positive himself. "I kept thinking, why is it that I can have HIV medication and not them? It was eating me up because I knew it was a solvable problem."

Then he met a woman in Africa who was running an AIDS clinic, and she asked him to track down a particular drug– one that was difficult to find– for her patients. Wildes found it and has been securing drugs ever since.

Wildes is the founder of the African AIDS Network, a nonprofit organization that relies on nurses, pharmacists and people with HIV who mail him surplus drug supplies or pills left over from AIDS patients who have died. Wildes, 37, meticulously sorts the donations to fill the prescriptions of 100 HIV sufferers in Africa who depend on his quarterly shipments to live.

"I started the African AIDS Network to prove that there is a way to help people in Africa who have AIDS," he said.

The 10-year veteran nurse had no qualms about leaving hospital work to launch the program in 1996. He was frustrated with managed care and had seen too many cases in which patients with better insurance received superior care.

The network is helping 100 people, but this is only a small fraction of the 25 million who are infected with HIV in Africa, according to statistics from the United Nations program UNAIDS.

Wildes sends medication to people in Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and the Republic of the Congo. At the same time, he is determined to find reinforcements who can fight the disease on a larger scale, and he’s looking at pharmaceutical companies to supply the extra help.

He has challenged drug heavyweights to donate HIV medications to Africa at reduced prices. Now, a 30-day supply of treatments for one person can cost between $300 and $800– unaffordable even for the higher wage earners in Tanzania, who make about $100 a year, Wildes said.

In war-torn Congo, phone access is nearly nonexistent, Wildes said. He believes that if his small operation can help people in that country, pharmaceutical companies with far more manpower and money can do the same.

David Katzenstein, MD, associate professor of medicine and infectious diseases at Stanford University Medical Center and an AIDS researcher at Stanford, agreed that the epidemic must be fought with more resources.

"Lee’s shown incredible dedication and energy to acquiring drugs, and this is a very important first step," Katzenstein said. "But it’s important to ask, how can we do this on a larger scale?"

Wildes’ drive to help the sick has been fueled by his many visits to Africa, where he’s seen orphanages stuffed with children who were abandoned after their parents died from AIDS. An estimated 2.4 million Africans died from the disease last year, according to UNAIDS. The epidemic is far more rampant in Africa than in any other continent, with more than 70 percent of the world’s population infected with the disease living in Africa alone, according to UNAIDS.

With a waiting list of 5,000 people, Wildes gives preference to HIV patients who have children and show potential as future AIDS activists. He runs the organization with the help of an RN, a medical doctor, a case manager and an administrative assistant.

For funding, the organization relies on $5,000 a month from AIDS Empowerment and Treatment International, a network of agencies and high-profile people living with HIV. Wildes volunteers his time and relies on monthly disability checks to pay his own bills.

For Wildes, treating 100 people who live 10,000 miles away sometimes is exhausting. He works from 6 a.m. to 2 a.m. on days when he talks by phone with African doctors if one of his drug recipients needs a change of medication. When the virus develops a resistance to a drug, the HIV patient must switch prescriptions.

Many take 25 pills a day to fight off the disease, and they cannot miss any treatments because this increases the risk that the virus will become resistant.

To improve his patients’ chances of survival, Wildes also visits them once a year to check medical records and ensure the treatments are working. Traveling in Africa has its costs, Wildes said, because his immune system has been weakened by HIV. He has returned to San Francisco with a case of cholera or dysentery almost every year.

When he’s not traveling overseas, Wildes often is inspecting donated pills to ensure they haven’t expired or been stored improperly. Then he sorts the pills into bottles to fill each patient’s prescription. When it’s finally time to ship the treatments, Wildes must carefully address the packages with specific information that meets African customs requirements.

Wildes not only gives volumes of time to run his organization, but he also takes legal risks by using donated drugs. Federal law prohibits people from giving someone the leftover medications of another patient. To protect the people who send him drugs, Wildes keeps his sources anonymous.

"I could do time for this," he admitted.

Like Wildes, Debbie Slamowitz, RN, study coordinator for the Stanford AIDS Clinical Trials Group, regularly comes across surplus AIDS medications. She has no reservations about directing extra drugs to patients who need them. She believes the African AIDS Network is a good cause as long as the group can continue to supply the medication on a regular basis.

"There’s a satisfaction in knowing that it’s an expensive drug that won’t go to waste, and I’m just passing it along," she said.

As for Wildes, he’s counting on the fact that it would be extremely unpopular with the public if he were arrested– not to mention the 100 Africans who would die if he stopped sending them treatments.

Despite the risks, Wildes is charging ahead to expand his program. He’s searching for a public relations firm to sponsor his organization’s effort to raise money. His goal: to provide treatment for 15,000 people within the next year.

"I’m doing this because it needs to be done," Wildes said. "AIDS is a human catastrophe."

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