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Overcoming fear and stigma in the age of HIV/AIDS
Even three decades later, Dr. Lorna Tumwebaze still remembers the fear she felt after encountering her first patient living with HIV at a hospital in her native Uganda. She had just performed a Cesarean section under poor infection control measures when the medical staff learned the mother had recently been diagnosed with the virus.

Too expensive, too slow, too discriminatory, and other myths about the polio eradication program
In 2017, there was a total of 22 polio cases in the world. To put that in perspective, in 1988, there were 350,000 cases of polio, with approximately 22 people (mostly children) becoming paralyzed every half hour. Today's 99 percent reduction of cases should be cause for celebration. The Optimist's Ryan Bell sat down with Jay Wenger, director of the polio program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to fact-check the most persistent myths about the effort to eradicate polio.