Haitian AIDS clinic still standing

The HIV/AIDS clinic in the center of the area of Port-au-Prince hardest hit by yesterday's 7.0 magnitude earthquake is badly damaged but still standing, and most of the center's staff is apparently alive, according to the clinic's director Jean Pape.

The GHESKIO center's outer wall in January 2008

"We were very lucky," Pape wrote in a message posted on the Weill Cornell Medical College's linkurl:global health website.;http://www.med.cornell.edu/globalhealth/ "I have heard from most of our staff and they are safe." Pape -- whom I visited in Haiti on assignment for __The Scientist__ in 2007 -- started The Haitian Study Group on Kaposi's Sarcoma and Opportunistic Infections (GHESKIO) in the early 1980s as the HIV/AIDS epidemic ravaged the Western Hemisphere's poorest nation, and has served as its director since then. My emails to Pape (who goes by "Bill") and other GHESKIO staff went unanswered until late afternoon, and phone service in Haiti...