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 the 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 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 the CHC set out to fight tuberculosis in remote rural Cambodia in 1994, the organization faced a sucession of obstacles. The world's indifference, an ongoing war that had destroyed the country's medical infrastructure and extreme poverty and lack of access to health care conspired to make Cambodia a hot spot of TB and, later, AIDS. The medical establishment doubted that poor rural peasants could successfully complete the required course of TB treatment, which lasted 6 months. The impediments to health were numerous, but the CHC developed a new kind of grass-roots delivery and discovery program in Cambodia that surmounted them.

There are thousands of people in CHC's rural and urban TB and AIDS programs who once faced certain death, but who are now leading productive lives. Through leveraging strong family and community ties, intensive community outreach and social support, microfinance strategies linked to TB treatment, and education and training, the CHC has been able to continuously expand its community based TB and HIV programs.  In Cambodia CHC programs are now reaching a million people, and CHC's approaches are increasingly serving as international models of health care delivery and of how to link basic scientific discovery to fight TB and AIDS globally.