Today at Brown

A “Eureka!” moment changed the course of Mark Lurie’s career.

While working on his master’s in African history, Lurie encountered Randall M. Packard’s book White Plague, Black Labor, which recounts South African history by tracing the thread of the tuberculosis epidemic of the early 1900s.

Lurie, a South Africa native, was struck by the modern-day parallel with HIV. Enrolling in Johns Hopkins’ Ph.D program in international health, he became a social epidemiologist to uncover why his homeland is the epicenter for HIV/AIDS.

Labor conditions for South African miners today are the same as they were when gold was discovered more than 100 years ago, Lurie said. “It’s migrant labor — young rural men living in single-sex hostels with access to sex workers and alcohol.” In the mining community where Lurie bases his research, more than half the women aged 20 to 24 carry the virus.

In 1995, Lurie went home to South Africa to do field research with a doctor, a research assistant, and his wife, Abigail Harrison, who is now a Brown assistant professor (research).

Soon after their arrival, the team received a grant from Britain’s Wellcome Trust. Lurie recalled, “They said, ‘Don't worry about how much it’s going to cost. Go and do the best science you can.’”

The team was able to follow 600 people over a three-year period and boost the project’s staff to 28. The research site became the Africa Centre for Health and Population Studies.

For five years, Lurie has been a core faculty member of Brown’s International Health Institute and a faculty member of the Population Studies and Training Center and Spatial Structures in the Social Sciences. Since 2001, he has also been a visiting scientist at the Nelson Mandela School of Medicine, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.

Lurie returns to South Africa three to four times per year to continue his research in the public health impact of antiretroviral therapy for HIV/AIDS, and to conduct a rural/urban survey to gauge young people’s knowledge and experience with HIV testing and treatment. Since 2000, he has followed a group of 90,000 people, who take a census every three months.

“Of 47 million South Africans, 20 percent of adults are infected with HIV,” Lurie said. “That’s more than 5 million people — more cases than in India, which has a billion people.

“We know as epidemiologists the shape of the curve, but we don’t know where we are on that curve.”