At the CHC, we combine medical care and outreach, intensive patient and family support, and food to combat tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and poverty in Cambodia, one of the poorest post-conflict countries in the world.

Our approach works.  We count our successes in thousands of lives transformed, from illness and certain death to health. Parents regain the ability to provide for their families, and raise children who have some hope for the future. Through patient care, advocacy and research, we strive to spread our success, enabling the poor and sick wherever they are to choose health for themselves and their families.

Tuberculosis can be cured and AIDS can be treated. That is true in the wealthiest countries of the world, and it is true in the poorest. However, when Dr. Anne Goldfeld and Dr. Sok Thim set out to attack tuberculosis in rural Cambodia in 1994, they faced a succession of barriers to treatment. It was not thought that poor rural peasants could successfully complete a 6 month course of treatment such as TB requires. The world's indifference, the ongoing war that had destroyed the country's medical infrastructure and the poverty and lack of access to health care conspired to make Cambodia a hot spot of TB and AIDS. The impediments to health were numerous, but this new kind of program, that CHC created from the grass roots in Cambodia, surmounted them.

In a country where previously only 30 percent of people who started TB treatment completed it, the CHC has achieved nearly 100 percent completion rates and greater than 95 percent cure rates of TB. That adds to up more than 13,000 people cured of TB in the last 13 years. There are thousands now in CHC's rural and urban AIDS programs who once faced certain death and who are now leading productive lives. Through leveraging what is strong in Cambodia, which is family and community connections, through community outreach and social support, including microfinance strategies linked to TB treatment, and through capacity building and training, CHC has been able to scale up these community based TB and HIV programs to impact TB and AIDS care in Cambodia at the national level. These approaches are serving as international models of delivery and discovery.