College President-elect Jim Yong Kim first left his mark on global health care when he and his friend, Paul Farmer, now a Harvard Medical School professor, risked being thrown out of Peru for their efforts to treat multi-drug resistant tuberculosis in the country. At the time, the World Health Organization recommended that only drug-susceptible tuberculosis be treated, incorrectly believing drug resistant TB was not contagious and would be eliminated as afflicted patients died.
"We thought that's not public health, that's sort of like public death," Kim said in the public television documentary, "Rx for Survival -- A Global Health Challenge."
The Korean-born Kim snuck pharmaceuticals into Peru, pretending to be a Japanese tourist, and designed drug cocktails to help treat the disease that was thought to be impractical to cure. This action helped launch Kim into medical advocacy that now includes expanding HIV/AIDS treatment and establishing a new health care delivery method in the developing world.
With the announcement that Kim will become Dartmouth's 17th president in July, the College gains not only an accomplished scholar and educator, but also a global health expert who transformed how people treat disease in the developing world, said Dartmouth Medical School professor Lisa Adams, director of the Dartmouth Global Health Initiative.
"This is a great day not just for global health, but for Dartmouth," Adams said.
In his efforts to treat TB in the developing world, Kim, who co-founded Partners in Health in 1987, also realized that many of the drugs used could be produced more cheaply because their patents had expired, Andrew Marx, the director of communications for Partners in Health, said. Kim also pioneered a new way to deliver health care, hiring local workers to ensure patients were adhering to complicated drug schedules.
"We had remarkable success rates in treating drug-resistant TB with the use of community health workers," Marx said.
After receiving grants from organizations including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to treat TB, Kim started applying the Partners in Health model of care to HIV/AIDS in 2002. Many thought fighting the epidemic in the developing world was too complicated and expensive, as it required consistent adherence to a multi-drug cocktail, Marx said.
"It really went from people saying, 'you can't do this, it can't be done,' to a complete 180," Adams said. "He really revolutionized it. That's not an exaggeration at all. A lot of TB patients have Partners in Health to thank."
The WHO hired Kim as director of its HIV/AIDS department in 2004, and Kim quickly helped launch the "3 by 5" initiative, an effort to treat 3 million people living with HIV/AIDS by the end of 2005. Although the goal was not achieved until 2007, ambitious plans like the "3 by 5" initiative are necessary for progress to be made, Adams said.
"That was a tremendous task and much more than other people thought could be done," she said.
Kim's recent work has focused on "the science of health care delivery," Kim told The Dartmouth in a previous interview.
"I'm interested in how do we improve execution and delivery around social goals in global health," he said. "We've suffered so many years from the assumption that once you have the pill you're done, that it'll get naturally delivered, and it never does."
At Harvard, Kim worked with faculty from Harvard Business School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on problems related to health care access, work that he hopes to continue in Hanover with Dartmouth faculty, he said.
Kim's global health work, profiled in Tracy Kidder's book, "Mountains Beyond Mountains," will inspire students, Adams said.
"This is the kind of person students aspire to be and the work they aspire to do," she said.
Marx said he has not spoken to Kim about his future role in Partners of Health, but he did say that he could not imagine Kim would leave the organization behind as he assumes his responsibilities at Dartmouth.
"I'm curious to know how he'll keep it up," Adams said. "He will have a full enough plate as president, but maybe there are some linkages."
The WHO did not return a request for comment by press time.
