February 18, 2009 –
The Central Laboratory of the Centre for Infectious Disease Research in Zambia (CIDRZ) has developed a profitable business model that might offer wealthy nations a way to jumpstart similar programs worldwide, then create profit centers to help sustain them.
This business model, developed under the leadership of Executive Director Jeff Stringer, MD, and Laboratory Director Ron Brown in collaboration with the lab’s new Business Manager Henry Latner-formerly of PACLAB Network Laboratories in Washington’s Puget Sound region-creates a sustainable funding source to assist funding at 64 free AIDS clinics in urban Luska, Zambia. The clinics provide more than 140,000 HIV-infected adults and children Antiretroviral Therapy (ART) and Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission (PMTCT) services.
With funding from the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) , the Central Laboratory experienced rapid scale-up of services over the last four years, growing at an annual rate of about 250%. Today, the lab performs more than one million tests annually.