This is Part 1 of a five-part multimedia feature, Dispatches from Mwanza, exploring Weill Cornell Medicine's partnership with Weill Bugando School of Medicine. The partnership improves health care in Tanzania, the U.S. and around the world.
The emergency room had a bed, a desk and a chair - and no ER doctor to serve it. Entire wards filled with hundreds of children suffered from Burkitt lymphoma, a childhood cancer unique to East Africa and Central Africa, as well as tuberculosis, HIV and congenital heart defects.
"But there was not a single pediatrician in the hospital," Dr. Dan Fitzgerald said.
Dr. Daniel Fitzgerald, director of Weill Cornell Medicine's Center for Global Health, describes the origins and benefits of a longstanding partnership with Weill Bugando School of Medicine in Mwanza, Tanzania.
The year was 2005, and Fitzgerald and his colleagues had been invited to Bugando Medical Centre in Mwanza, Tanzania, by the newly formed Weill Bugando Medical School, part of an institution that would become the Catholic University of Health and Allied Sciences (CUHAS), to assist with the school's development.
Bugando Medical Centre, the university's teaching hospital, serves more than 15 million people - a population the size of New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago combined. As the region's referring hospital, it gets the sickest of the sick. Some patients travel two days by boat across Lake Victoria to get there.
"Even the director of the hospital at the time said, 'We're a big teaching hospital, but we're staffed like we're a small dispensary out in the village,'" said Fitzgerald, the B.H. Kean Professor in Tropical Medicine, a professor in medicine in microbiology and immunology, and director of the Center for Global Health at Weill Cornell Medicine.
That's because Tanzania, famous for Mount Kilimanjaro and iconic nature reserves such as the Serengeti, had a dubious distinction: the fewest physicians of nearly any nation in the world. Just one doctor served every 50,000 people in 2002. In comparison, the U.S. has 184 doctors per 50,000 people.
At center, Dr. Daniel Fitzgerald, director of Weill Cornell Medicine's Center for Global Health, chats with Dr. Grace Ruselu, left, and Dr. Godfrey Kisigo, right, at Bugando Medical Centre in Mwanza, Tanzania.
Since then, a 24-year partnership between Weill Cornell Medicine and Weill Bugando School of Medicine has not only helped Weill Bugando to graduate more than 2,220 MDs since it was founded in 2003. The collaboration has also enabled both medical schools to improve their students' education, boost health care in Tanzania with strategies applicable to the U.S., and conduct innovative research on diseases that affect people around the world.
"Fast forward 20 years: Now there is just an amazing group of physician educators in multiple departments - in pediatrics, surgery, obstetrics, gynecology," Fitzgerald said. "And Weill Bugando School of Medicine is now recognized as really the one of the best medical schools in East Africa."
Although Weill Bugando is not part of Weill Cornell Medicine, they share a common philanthropist - Sanford I. "Sandy" Weill - and a memorandum of understanding to exchange faculty and students, and collaborate on education, research and patient care.
"The quality of care is improving, and this benefit goes now to the community here in Mwanza," said Dr. Stephen Mshana, professor of clinical microbiology and infectious disease and deputy vice chancellor of planning, finance and administration at CUHAS.
