A prescription for health inequity: building public health infrastructure in resource-poor settings.

“My family has already purchased a coffin for me,” Naeema explained, enervated though she was. “The medicine we got from the local clinic has not helped. I am getting worse. We have spent almost all of our money going to regional hospitals to get a diagnostic test and request government subsidized medicine. My parents have sold everything we had – our crops, our land, and our livestock – to pay for my medicine. My family does not have any more money or even enough food to eat.” Naeema was HIV-positive, and due to a lack of diagnostic capabilities or availability of antiretroviral treatments (ARTs) in her village of Kibosho in Tanzania, she had been bed-bound for more than three months after the onset of her symptoms, when she first arrived at the clinic.