"When Micheline Leon was diagnosed with HIV, her parents told her they would fit her for a coffin. Fifteen years later, she walks around her two-room concrete house on Haiti's central plateau, watching her four children play under the plantain trees. She looks healthy, her belly amply filling a gray, secondhand T-shirt. Her three sons and one daughter were born after she was diagnosed. None has the virus. "I'm not sick," she explained patiently on a recent afternoon. "People call me sick but I'm not. I'm infected." In many ways the 35-year-old mother's story is Haiti's too. In the early 1980s, when the strange and terrifying disease showed up in the U.S. among migrants who had escaped Haiti's dictatorship, experts thought it could wipe out a third of the country's population. Instead, Haiti's HIV infection rate stayed in the single digits, then plummeted. In a wide range of interviews with doctors, patients, public health experts and others, The Associated Press found that Haiti's success in the face of chronic political and social turmoil came because organizations cooperated and tailored programs to the country's specific challenges." - Anne Bouey from Bookmarklet

"Researchers now test men and women aged 15 to 49, and the official rate is 2.2 percent, according to UNAIDS. That's still far higher than in the developed world, but it's lower than the Bahamas, Guyana and Suriname, and much lower than sub-Saharan Africa, where the rate averages about 5 percent but spikes to 24 percent in Botswana and 33 percent in Swaziland. But the crisis is far from over. In the Artibonite Valley, where Boston-based Partners in Health is just now setting up two clinics, the estimated infection rate is 4.5 percent. Some in these remote regions still look for care from Voodoo priests, who ask for large sums of money or goods and use treatments doctors say can be poisonous. Thanks in large part to UNAIDS, which awarded Haiti its first grant in 2002, and $420 million from the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, an estimated 18,000 people are on AIDS drugs, most of them administered free through GHESKIO and PIH." - Anne Bouey