Public Health

Antigone Barton was interviewed on South Florida's local PBS station, WPBT Channel 2.

Watch the interview on the Heroes of HIV interactive website.

Watch the video on the Heroes of HIV interactive website.

It was 1982 when Dr. Jean Malecki examined a dying 9-month-old baby and made the first pediatric AIDS diagnosis in Palm Beach County.

The parents, who had arrived recently from the Caribbean, were sick, too.

"Within six months, the child had died," Malecki said. "The whole family got wiped out by the disease."

Malecki states this flatly because in the past 25 years, the Palm Beach County health director says, she has seen that flinching from the truth accomplishes nothing.

Australia's needle exchange program aims to prevent injecting drug users from sharing dirty needles.

This video takes you inside the walls of one of the worst prisons in the Western hemisphere. Overcrowding, poor sanitation, and a general lack of funding in Haiti's National Penitentiary have led to exorbitant HIV and Tuberculosis rates. Reporter Antigone Barton and videographer Stephen Sapienza take a first-hand look at these conditions and an American doctor working to correct them. After this video was taken, USAID authorized $200,000 in emergency funding for health and sanitation improvements.

Aired on Foreign Exchange November 2007.

Loretta Tofani spent fourteen months in China researching working conditions in Chinese factories. She details her investigation and the risks some Chinese workers face in the manufacturing sector.

These are good times in this embattled capital.

Kidnappings are down and trash is picked up.

Brightly-painted trucks that serve as buses drive through bustling streets where vendors supply cheap wares and workers repair ancient machines with obsolete tools.

United Nations trucks patrol the streets, too, but after years of outside intervention, the people of this impoverished republic are running their own government.

With HIV widespread in prisons, Dr. John May travels back and forth from the U.S. to treat infected inmates in Haiti.

CANGE, Haiti — Trucks teeter perilously as they climb the rutted and rock-strewn road between Port-au- Prince and Cange, jolting the people who travel unsheltered on their cargo.

Under the best conditions, it is a three-hour journey of lurching, halting and downpours.

It was an especially hard trek for a frail and feverish 35-year-old woman named Benita, who was put atop a truck one day in August after seven months of growing weaker while the pain in her belly grew stronger.

Experts at the International AIDS Society Conference discuss the future of treating and preventing the HIV virus.

Sex workers in the Dominican Republic fight against the growing rate of HIV and AIDS among them through vaccine trials and sex education.

Aired on Foreign Exchange the week of November 16, 2007.

Watch the video on the Heroes of HIV interactive website.