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Yonkers Rotary to combat pediatric AIDS

(Original publication: October 6, 2006)

YONKERS — In the past year, New Rochelle resident Charles Katze helped the Yonkers Rotary Club ship 400 used computers to South Africa and buy 2,200 dictionaries for Yonkers schoolchildren. Now Katze and the service club are setting their sights on the Dominican Republic.

The Rotary Club's Mother-Baby AIDS Project will tackle the mother-to-baby transmission rate in the southeastern Dominican province of La Romana, which has one of the highest HIV-infection rates outside sub-Saharan Africa. The Yonkers Rotary Club intends to raise $50,000 by the end of the year to expand a pilot program there in 2007.

Pediatric AIDS has been virtually eliminated in the United States through simple and inexpensive medical interventions that the Rotary Club wants to export.

"They were trying different methods of keeping mothers and babies separate and they got it down to 4 percent," Katze, 76, said of a program developed in New York City to keep babies from catching AIDS from their mothers.

The goal is to achieve similar results in the Dominican Republic, then replicate the results in other parts of the world.

Yonkers Rotary Club member Dr. Stephen Nicholas, director of Columbia University's International Family AIDS Program, is in the Dominican Republic overseeing the pilot program that began there in 1999.

The pediatric AIDS-reduction program works by giving HIV-positive pregnant mothers a drug cocktail that drives the HIV out of the mother's bloodstream and into her organs. The baby is then delivered by Caesarean section and given anti-AIDS drugs and fed with formula instead of breast milk, which carries the HIV.

The Yonkers Rotary Club's efforts will help expand what has been a pilot program, Nicholas said.

"It is likely to become the model that will be adopted throughout the Dominican Republic," he wrote in an e-mail from La Romana, where he is living. "This would save the lives of hundreds of babies annually."