The Swiss section of the International Society for Human Rights (IGFM-CH) grants the 2019 Swiss human rights award to Prof. Dr. Ruedi Lüthy.
For the past 25 years, the IGFM-CH has granted the Swiss human rights award to people that reached outstanding achievements regarding the improvement of human rights. This year the committee decided to honor Prof. Dr. Ruedi Lüthy. The official ceremony will be held on Saturday, 7th December 2019 at 10:00 am in the Hotel Kreuz in Bern.
Prof. Dr. Ruedi Lüthy has been fighting the HIV epidemic for decades. He founded and continues running the Newlands Clinic in Harare, Zimbabwe. Thanks to this clinic, our awardee can effectively fight this terrible disease. Today, more than 6’500 HIV patients that live in the poorest conditions receive lifelong medical support in his clinic. His enormous efforts and knowledge bring back hope to a myriad of desperate young people and their families. The medical support allows these people to live a self-determined, independent life again. Therewith Ruedi Lüthy can significantly increase the locals’ Human Rights.
As the founder of the Ruedi Lüthy Foundation and the Newlands Clinic, Ruedi Lüthy ensures that the patients are treated as well as possible. He also shares his great knowledge with the training center in his clinic in order to instruct local doctors and nurses with the best medical practices.
AIDS-Expert ab initio
As a specialist for infectious diseases, Ruedi Lüthy has been working with HIV since the 1980s. In the very beginning, as head of the department of infectious diseases at the University Hospital in Zurich, he could not do any more than accompany the patients until their death. In 1988, he co-founded the Swiss HIV Cohort Study (SHCS) with colleagues of his. The SHCS became one of the most successful interdisciplinary research network of Switzerland (www.shcs.ch).
In the late 1980s he and other specialists in the field founded the Zurich Lighthouse hospice – a place for people to die in peace. Ruedi Lüthy managed this place for many years. Thanks to effective medication, the HIV infection became a curable but chronic disease in Switzerland in the mid-1990s.
In the southern parts of Africa this is unfortunately not the case. HIV is still omnipresent: In Zimbabwe 1.3 Million people carry the virus and every year more than 30’000 of them die of AIDS. Ruedi Lüthy perceived it as his ethic duty to help relieve the misery of these people in Zimbabwe. After a fulfilled professional life in Switzerland and just before his retirement, Ruedi Lüthy started collecting donations and the necessary equipment to finally be able to found an HIV clinic in the capital Harare in 2003.
The SHCS is proud that Ruedi Lüthy receives such a prestigious and well deserved price and we send him our congratulations.
On behalf of the SHCS,
Huldrych Günthard
President of the SHCS
website Ruedi Lüthy Foundation
interview with Dr. Ruedi Lüthy