Helping hands across the globe

A landlocked country in southeastern Africa, Malawi faces significant health care challenges, which are made worse by difficulty in obtaining medical equipment and supplies.

To help fill the needs, University of Louisville faculty members joined forces with Louisville nonprofit SOS International earlier this year to learn the most critical needs, then pack and deliver a 40-foot shipping container with those supplies to health care workers and researchers in Malawi.

The project originated with Rochelle Holm, a UofL associate professor with the Christina Lee Brown Envirome Institute who is conducting wastewater-based epidemiology research in the city of Blantyre, Malawi, and Bethany Hodge, director of the Global Education Office in the UofL School of Medicine. When Hodge traveled to the country in 2023 to explore learning and service opportunities for UofL medical students in the Distinction in Global Health track, she took note of specific needs in the Malawi hospitals she visited.

“Whenever I am walking through a clinical site overseas or seeing other kinds of work going on, I am mentally taking inventory of all the things the doctors, nurses and staff are saying would facilitate their work,” said Hodge, who also is a board member of SOS, which recovers and redistributes surplus medical supplies that otherwise would go into landfills. “There were enough things on their lists that I knew SOS had in their warehouse that I wanted to connect the two entities once I got home to see if the SOS program could be part of filling the needs.”

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Holm is permanently based in Malawi, where her research involves regular sampling of wastewater from two hospitals as well as community pit latrines to monitor infectious disease trends and outbreaks. The work requires supplies that are difficult to obtain locally, specifically consumable items such as pipettes, personal protective equipment and laboratory analysis supplies. Holm also asked her research and hospital collaborators about their most critical needs.

Hodge relayed the hospitals’ and Holm’s needs to SOS, which assembled the items and organized a shipment that included durable medical equipment, surgical and consumable medical supplies for area hospitals, along with the research supplies for Holm’s work.

The materials, valued at $380,077, were packed in the container and departed Louisville in late May. The shipment arrived in Malawi on Sep. 20.

“The supplies we received from SOS are difficult to obtain in country, so this shipment is extremely valuable,” Holm said. “It will allow us to continue testing for pathogens circulating in the community with less concern about running out of materials for our research, as well as assisting the sampling sites with meeting critical supply needs to support health care delivery.”

The Malawi University of Science and Technology, which collaborates with Holm on the wastewater research, and its hospital partners received a portion of the shipment.

“As a university, we really appreciate the donation from SOS, which has come at the right time when the university is strengthening its outreach aspect,” said Petros Chigwechokha, head of Malawi University’s Department of Biological Sciences. “The donation will be extended to the university’s key partners, Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital and Thyolo District Hospital, where they will fill a big gap in equipment and consumables and ultimately strengthen health delivery services.”

Another segment of the shipment went to a heath care facility in southern Malawi supported by Bridge Kids International, a Louisville-based group that works locally and abroad to connect children to their African heritage culture and build relationships between Africans and African Americans.