Janet Cunningham Zain Shauk

Janet Cunningham recently went from a Glendale hospital with more than 60 surgeons to a country with only four that are responsible for serving more than 13 million people.anet Cunningham recently went from a Glendale hospital with more than 60 surgeons to a country with only four that are responsible for serving more than 13 million people.

She was in Malawi on one of many medical missions she has taken as part of Glendale Adventist Medical Center’s resident training program, which she directs.

Her observations during missions to Malawi, India, Costa Rica, Mexico, Armenia, England and Guatemala have shaped her understanding of health-care delivery, and she reflected on her most recent work in an African nation where mothers die during childbirth at a rate 180 times higher than any other country.

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ZAIN SHAUK: What kinds of issues do you typically tackle when you go on missions to developing countries?

JANET CUNNINGHAM: Well, during this trip to Malawi, for instance, I went two years ago with a group called the Global AIDS Interfaith Alliance, and they’re busy working with different mosques and churches to try and do AIDS prevention work. So they’re working with youth and they’re working with children and with the members of their community to both care for people who have AIDS and get medicine for people who can’t get medicine and do care for the dying and AIDS orphan care, and so it’s kind of expanded around all of the ramifications of AIDS prevalence when it’s very high in a society.

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Q: What is the quality of the medical expertise and health-care infrastructure there?

A: It varies a lot, and Malawi is one of the poorest countries in the world. When we went two years ago, most people there were not tested for AIDS so they didn’t know they were infected until they were ready to die. So there was a big government effort in the last couple of years to make antiretroviral medicines available to people so that they would get tested. They really didn’t have any idea what the prevalence of AIDS in that country was because nobody would get tested. The stigmatization of getting tested and finding out your were positive was too great, especially because there was no treatment that anybody could offer you.

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Q: What were the greatest concerns for doctors there?