Francesca Conradie - From HIV to Groundbreaking TB Research SpotlightNSP: SouthAfrica
It was one of her family's weekly trips to the local library that helped make the decision clear. While flipping through the pages of Dr Christiaan Barnard's autobiography 'One Life' and reading about the man who performed the world's first heart transplant, Conradie knew that she wanted to pursue a career in medicine.A young Conradie with big dreams of saving lives had no idea that 50 years later she would be a global pioneer in her field.
That hunger to learn led Conradie to medical school at the University of the Witwatersrand. She graduated in 1988 and began her internship as South Africa was facing what would become one of the biggest global health challenges in decades - HIV/AIDS."HIV was far and away the biggest problem that any South African would face," says Conradie."I realised that if I was going to be an effective doctor, I needed to learn how to treat HIV.
"I saw a lot of women who were pretty much the same as me but had gotten infected with HIV," Conradie recalls."In the earliest days, when we had no treatment, they would ask things like - can you not just give me something because I want to be alive when my child goes to school? That's what drove me to HIV research -- I really wanted to be able to help, particularly women, to survive.
Around the time that these results came out, Conradie was beginning to look for a new avenue to take her research - and she soon found one. "In the last episode, I finally looked at his X-ray. His lungs were very badly damaged. I thought this [was] lung cancer." In the two decades since she qualified as a doctor, there have been massive strides in HIV treatment with over 30 drugs entering the field. But the same could not be said for TB.
The options were to give people injections that caused hearing loss in half of the patients who received them or put them on an extensive selection of pills. Conradie says the default treatment was"a meal full of pills", with people taking 23 tablets a day for 18 months - that means one person would be taking over 12 000 tablets to try to beat the disease.