Stopping Spread of AIDS in India Is Yale Medical Student’s ‘Addiction’

Founding and running a successful non-profit organization is usually more than a full-time job in itself. But Vivek Murthy, 21, not only manages a charity to prevent the spread of AIDS in India; he is also in his first year at Yale’s School of Medicine.

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Mr. Murthy says that juggling both responsibilities means that he often ends up sleeping little more than four or five hours a night. Non-profit colleagues say they are used to receiving e-mail messages from him that were written in the middle of the night — but he says he doesn’t mind working so hard because he has found that “community service can be addictive.”

His constant desire to be involved in community service is evident in the name of his organization — VISIONS Worldwide, which stands for Volunteering International-Oriented Students in Organizing Never-Ending Service.

While Mr. Murthy aspires for his charity to work in many parts of the world, its efforts are now focused mainly on training young people to work in India to stop the spread of the human immunodeficiency virus, which causes AIDS. Mr. Murthy — who was born in England and raised in Miami — has strong ties to India because that is where his parents were born.

Mr. Murthy started thinking about the AIDS problem in India when he was a high-school student. At Palmetto Senior High School in Miami, where he graduated at age 16 as valedictorian of his class, he started a program in which he and his high-school classmates taught middle-school kids about AIDS.

He began to wonder how the disease was being treated in poor countries, especially in India.

“I began to read a little about how H.I.V. was affecting India, and what struck me was the risk factor,” he says, noting India’s large population, high illiteracy rate, and the cultural taboo surrounding any talk of sexuality. “I thought that AIDS was going to become a very big problem in India.”

He was right. Today, more people in India have H.I.V. than in any other country. Of the world’s 29 million H.I.V.-infected people in 1997, more than 4.1 million were in India, according to the United Nations AIDS Council. And, while AIDS mortality rates are dropping in the United States, the spread of H.I.V. in developing countries continues to escalate.

What troubles Mr. Murthy even more, he says, is that one-third of the people in India with H.I.V. are teen-agers or in their early 20s. That is why in 1995, while a freshman at Harvard University, he founded his charity, which helps pay for American students to go to India during the summer months to teach AIDS-prevention courses and to train Indian students and others to continue such efforts long after the American students leave.

While many other non-profit groups have tried to stem the AIDS epidemic in India by distributing condoms and by teaching sex education to people considered to be at high risk of contracting and spreading the disease — such as prostitutes and truck drivers — they have failed to do much to change the behavior of young people, Mr. Murthy says.

Many Indian youngsters do not have access to programs where they can learn about sexual health and drug abuse or obtain condoms, he says. Counseling is rarely available, and family-planning clinics are often restricted to married women and couples, he adds.

“If you look at developing countries, youth are a vastly untapped resource,” Mr. Murthy says. “Young people are a force for change because they are resilient, open to change, creative, and often idealistic.”

He adds, “Since they are still at the stage of experimentation, youth can learn more easily than adults to adopt safe practices. They can also help take the sting and shame out of AIDS where it is still stigmatized.”

Through the charity — which has chapters at Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Tufts University — some 200 American students have educated more than 30,000 young people in the Indian cities of Bangalore, Kathmandu (Nepal), Mumbai, and New Delhi.

In July 1997, Mr. Murthy created another program, called Swasthya, which means “good health” in Sanskrit. It works in and around Sringeri, a town in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. The group is a collaboration involving VISIONS Worldwide, the Sharada Dhanvantari Charitable Hospital in Sringeri, and women who live in the town.

The partnership identifies women who want to learn nursing and community-health skills and trains them to educate others about health matters and to provide basic treatment. In addition, Swasthya has designed counseling programs and sensitivity training for the nurses because of the cultural difficulties in broaching topics like sexually transmitted diseases. “Our goal is to plant the seeds for local service to take place,” Mr. Murthy says.

But he also has a second mission, as important as the first. Through VISIONS Worldwide — which has a $140,000 operating budget this year — he says he is trying “to expand students’ awareness of what is happening on the international scene.”

VISIONS Worldwide, says Mr. Murthy, has the potential to enable American students from diverse backgrounds to work for the betterment of global society by creating a social-service ethic in India. He adds that he hopes his non-profit organization someday will be able to do the same in Latin America and Southeast Asia.

Mr. Murthy says that after he finishes medical school, he hopes to explore the potential of creating a for-profit health corporation that would channel its profits into a foundation that would distribute health treatments — like drugs that treat AIDS — to poor people in the United States and in developing countries.

“Politics and economies are becoming more global. But our sense of social responsibility and community concerns have to expand just as rapidly,” he says.