Those who live and die behind prison walls don’t usually get much public attention. Incarceration is, after all, meant to remove criminals from society. But contagious and potentially deadly diseases can’t be locked and left in a penitentiary, especially when infected inmates are eventually released.

The problem of prisoners and ex-convicts transmitting diseases to the general population is especially bad in the countries of the former Soviet Union, where rates of tuberculosis and drug-resistant strains of TB are among the world’s highest.

But Stanford researchers have identified solutions that could help curb tuberculosis in Russia, Latvia, Tajikistan and the 12 other countries in the region. Led by Jeremy Goldhaber-Fiebert, an assistant professor of medicine, the team has shown that a genetic TB and drug resistance screening tool called GeneXpert is more cost effective and better at reducing the spread of the disease than other methods currently recommended by the World Health Organization. Their findings were published online Nov. 27 in PLoS Medicine.

“Tuberculosis doesn’t stop at any border or any locked gate,” said Goldhaber-Fiebert, who is also a faculty member at Stanford Health Policy, a research center at the university’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

“Drug-resistant TB is rampant in prisons,” he said. “When infected prisoners get out, they are thought to drive the TB epidemic in the general population. We are looking to find better ways to deal with that.”

About 400,000 cases of TB were diagnosed last year in the 15 former Soviet Union states – 40 times the number reported in the United States. Nearly 80,000 of the sick had drug-resistant TB. According to several studies, the prevalence of TB among the region’s prisoners is 10 times greater than that of the general population.

The WHO suggests three ways to screen for TB in prisons: relying on inmates to report symptoms, actively interviewing prisoners about their health, and administering chest X-rays. The organization doesn’t recommend one method over another, and currently, prisoners in the former Soviet Union are screened annually with miniature chest X-rays.

While X-rays can show whether a lung looks healthy, they don’t always catch TB. And when they do, they cannot differentiate between a TB that can be cured with standard medications and its drug-resistant cousins that require more expensive and extensive treatments.

That’s where GeneXpert has an upper hand.

Since it was introduced in 2005, the diagnostic has been hailed as a potentially powerful tool that can help to cut TB and drug-resistance rates by more accurately diagnosing people and getting them treated. With just a small sample of mucous analyzed by a machine, the GeneXpert system can instantly detect TB and its drug-resistant genetic mutations, well suited to mass screening within the prison systems of the former Soviet Union.

But the GeneXpert test is more expensive than alternative screening methods. And while it promises to be more effective, its impact on total costs had not been quantified in the former Soviet Union region until Goldhaber-Fiebert and his colleagues began their work nearly three years ago.

By developing computer models of the former Soviet Union’s prison populations, the team predicted that using GeneXpert can cut the prevalence of TB among inmates by about 20 percent within four years – provided the screening is combined with standard regimens of drug treatment for infected patients and for those with drug-resistant TB.

“For this to make sense, you need to have the right drugs to cure those individuals you identify,” Goldhaber-Fiebert said.

The additional cost of screening with GeneXpert averages to $71 per prisoner compared to the next best alternative approach, he said.

When compared to the decreases in illness and increases in survival, and factoring the financial and societal costs of TB in the broader population, the method makes good economic sense, he said.

“There is a large, direct value to using this technology for screening in prison settings, and there are potentially substantial secondary benefits to the general population of the former Soviet Union and to the world,” Goldhaber-Fiebert said.

Douglas K. Owens, a professor of medicine who is one of the paper’s co-authors and director of Stanford Health Policy, said the findings could give governments and medical experts the evidence they need to change the way they tackle TB.

“This is the kind of work we hope will inform policymaking about TB control,” Owens said. “We’ve shown there’s a more effective approach for trying to catch TB in prisons, and that means a better chance for preventing the disease from spreading.”

Co-authors on the PLoS Medicine paper also include former Stanford medical student Daniel Winetsky and current Stanford doctoral student in Management Science and Engineering, Diana Negoescu.

The researchers collaborated with the AIDS Foundation East-West. Funding for the study came from Äids Fonds, the International Research & Exchanges Board, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the National Institutes of Health, and Stanford.

The government’s far-reaching health care foreign aid program has contributed to a significant decline in adult death rates in Africa, according to a new study by Stanford researchers. 

Between 2004 and 2008, the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief was associated with a reduction in the odds of death of nearly 20 percent in the countries where it operated. The researchers found that more than 740,000 lives were saved during this period in nine countries targeted by the program, known by its acronym, PEPFAR.

“We were surprised and impressed to find these mortality reductions,” said Eran Bendavid, an affiliate at Stanford Health Policy, part of the university’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

“While many assume that foreign aid works, most evaluations of aid suggest it does not work or even causes harm,” said Bendavid, an assistant professor of medicine at Stanford’s School of Medicine. “Despite all the challenges to making aid work and to implementing HIV treatment in Africa, the benefits of PEPFAR were large and measurable across many African countries.”



The study is the first to show a decline in all causes of death related to the program. It appears in the May 16 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Bendavid is the lead author of the study. It was co-authored by Grant Miller and Jay Bhattacharya, who are both core faculty members of Stanford Health Policy and associate professors of medicine. The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Dr. George Rosenkranz Prize for Health Care Research in Developing Countries.

PEPFAR began in 2003 under the Bush administration with a five-year, $15 billion investment in fighting AIDS around the world and a focus on treatment and prevention in 15 countries. It was reauthorized by Congress in 2008 and has expanded its reach to 31 countries.

To measure the impact of the program, Bendavid and his colleagues analyzed health and survival information for more than 1.5 million adults in 27 African countries, including nine countries where PEPFAR has focused its efforts. The researchers examined data available in the Demographic and Health Surveys, a USAID-funded project that involves a representative sampling of in-person interviews among women in which they discuss their health and the health of their family members. These surveys form the foundation of many health measurements in developing countries.

They found the odds of death from any cause among adults were 16 to 20 percent lower in the PEPFAR-targeted countries.

To bolster the results, the scientists did a separate analysis using specific data on PEPFAR programs in Rwanda and Tanzania. They compared regions of the two countries where PEPFAR’s investments led to widespread increases in the number and size of sites providing antiretroviral therapy, with areas where PEPFAR had fewer services available.



“We observed a similar reduction in mortality when exploring PEPFAR’s effects using a different lens,” Bendavid said.

In Tanzania, the odds of death were found to be 17 percent lower and in Rwanda 25 percent lower in the districts with greater support from PEPFAR.

Bendavid speculates that the program’s commitment to building an infrastructure that includes drug distribution systems, clinics, pharmacies, laboratories and testing facilities has been an important factor for its success.

“The scale of PEPFAR’s investment was unprecedented,” Bendavid said. “People working in PEPFAR’s focus countries describe working supply chains, stocked pharmacies and staffed clinics.”



Although the program was targeted to address HIV, these services could have benefitted patients with a variety of other health concerns. For example, one study found that some uninfected, pregnant women in Ethiopia, Rwanda and Tanzania chose to deliver their babies in facilities supported by PEPFAR, Bendavid said.

Some have argued that focusing resources on a specific disease, such as AIDS, may detract efforts from other diseases and activities, undermining some of the benefits of such programs. But the latest study does not support this argument. Rather, it suggests that PEPFAR helped prevent additional deaths from causes other than HIV/AIDS.

“Whether disease-specific programs like PEPFAR have synergies with other health improvement efforts – or instead undermine them, as some have worried – is really an open question,” Miller said. “There are reasons to think either scenario is possible, and more research is needed. We don’t find much evidence of PEPFAR undercutting other initiatives. If anything, we see hints of synergies.”



Bendavid said the program managed to accomplish the reduction in mortality in the face of enormous challenges – from persuading people to go for HIV testing and treatment to dealing with problems of drug shortages and drug resistance.

Historically, few other large-scale health initiatives have succeeded to such an extent. Smallpox, which was eradicated by 1979, is among the rare and more notable examples.

“PEPFAR’s success with HIV … may be considered the clearest demonstration of aid’s effectiveness in recent years,” the researchers concluded.

In 2009, PEPFAR was folded into a new Global Health Initiative that calls for a broader agenda, with some resources redistributed to other programs, such as maternal and child health.

Its budget, which rose dramatically in the early years, has remained relatively flat or declined slightly since then. It peaked at $6.8 billion in fiscal year 2010, then declined to $6.7 billion and $6.6 billion in fiscal years 2011 and 2012, respectively, according to figures from the Kaiser Family Foundation. The Obama administration’s budget request for the 2013 fiscal year is $6.4 billion.

While the program appears to have had an impact within a few years of its implementation, Bendavid noted that reduced investments in fighting AIDS, both through PEPFAR and other international aid programs, could have implications for the future of the epidemic.

“We are transforming the face of the epidemic but funding shortfalls will change the road ahead,” he said.



Ruthann Richter is Director of Media Relations for the Stanford School of Medicine.