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Professor Mosepele Mosepele: Where it all Began

It always has to start somewhere. Professor Mosepele Mosepele’s early journey into the medical field was nothing more than just a vicarious experience in the Operating Room at the Mahalapye District Hospital. He was still in pre-school and as Martha Henry aptly quotes him in a 2014 Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health article, he was just fascinated by “people dressed up all in blue with big lights hovering over patients like in a TV show”.

The article is titled: Dr. Mosepele Mosepele: Coming of Age with the Epidemic. The epidemic then was HIV/AIDS. In the article, Martha Henry depicts a young Mosepele leaving home to school every morning with his mother who was an Operating Room (OR) nurse at Mahalapye District Hospital.

Incidentally, the name Mosepele means journey in English and from that vicarious Operating Room experience Professor Mosepele’s journey into this noble profession had thus begun.

If the mother had an early operation, a young Mosepele would sit in an office with a window overlooking the OR. Though only five years old, the boy would watch the surgical team operating. “People were dressed up all in blue with big lights hovering over the patients like in a TV show,” remembers Mosepele. “It didn’t scare me,” he said. “I was fascinated.”

The doctors in Mahalapye were mostly male Europeans, mainly from Scandinavia. “I admired them,” said Mosepele, “but I thought, why aren’t local people doing this? Maybe I could try it.” While still in preschool, he decided to become a doctor.

Martha Henry writes that Mosepele would come of age at the height of Botswana’s AIDS epidemic. “In the 1990s, the people of my generation remember our middle school and high school teachers getting sick and dying. Some of my favorite teachers passed away. You would go on school holiday and come back and they would look very different. And before the end of the school term, they were gone.”

That somehow motivated Mosepele who at the age of 19 would spend his year of Tirelo Setshaba (national service) working in the pathology lab at Princess Marina Referral Hospital in Gaborone. As Botswana did not then have a medical school, he would move overseas where he attended the University of Melbourne in Australia to earn a joint undergraduate degree in medicine and bio-medical science.

He returned to Princess Marina Hospital where a year and a half after finishing medical school, would become Head of the Infectious Disease Care Clinic. Martha Henry also writes that while in Australia he had seen only one patient with HIV. Now he was in charge of one of the largest AIDS clinics in Africa, providing treatment to thousands of patients. It was demanding work, but he thrived.

After his clinical experience, Mosepele would spend time at Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania for his internship and residency in internal medicine. While in Philadelphia, he worked in the Prison Health System, providing HIV care for inmates.

Security was tight. Prisoners were brought into the examining room, which had a Plexiglas door so that guards could see in. “It was very challenging,” said Mosepele. “Unfortunately, many of the inmates suffered from mental health issues, or IV drug use, or other risky behavior.” He wore a panic alarm to pull if a situation became threatening, but he never had to use it.

Martha Henry describes Professor Mosepele as a professional who “combines the hard-driving intelligence of a top researcher with the warmth of a friendly internist”.

Professor Mosepele would then graduate from a fellowship in Infectious Disease at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and then a Masters in Clinical Epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. Professor Mosepele’s research interests cut across the entire spectrum of HIV-continuum of care and its complications with focus on stigma in HIV testing and treatment uptake.

The research also focuses on the role of treatment partners for people living with HIV who are engaged in care as well as use of new anti-retroviral agents in resource limited settings. In addition, Professor Mosepele’s research focuses on cardio-metabolic/end-organ complications of HIV infection especially risk of cardiovascular disease, frailty, obesity, glucose and intolerance.

 “Mosepele recognizes the importance of being at the cutting edge of research, like the interaction between AIDS and cardiovascular disease, ” said Dr. Max Essex, Chair of the Harvard AIDS Initiative in Martha Henry’s article.

Dr Essex described Professor Mosepele then as an excellent mentor in the making. “He’ll also be a great example of how young doctors can combine both clinical practice and research that is of particular importance to Botswana,” said Dr Essex.

“People respect him and they listen to him,” said Dr. Stephen Gluckman, a Professor of Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and one of Mosepele’s mentors. “He is and will continue to be an excellent role model for young Batswana physicians.”

While Professor Mosepele had looked forward to his role as a mentor, especially to teaching young doctors how to interact with patients, he now finds himself having to mentor the nation how to combat the spread of COVID-19.

“You have to acknowledge the person first,” he had said then. “That way you can begin to see each other as human beings and work collaboratively to solve your problem. It’s about us working together.”

And that is how life appears to have turned out for Professor Mosepele as Botswana, like the rest of the world, grapples with the COVID-19 pandemic. His resume speaks volumes of the man who in the wake of COVID-19 would become one of the focal persons in the fight against the virus.

When the President, Dr Mokgweetsi Masisi, established a National COVID-19 Taskforce, among the brains and health experts he brought together was Professor Mosepele as Deputy Coordinator of the Taskforce. He was plucked from the University of Botswana where he is Acting Deputy Dean, Research and Graduate Education in the Faculty of Medicine. Professor Mosepele is also an Associate Professor of Internal Medicine and Infectious Disease and Head of Medicine in the Faculty. He has also served as senior lecturer in Internal Medicine, Infectious Diseases and Clinical Epidemiology for almost four years.

Courtesy of aids.harvard.edu

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