KU students form team to fight tuberculosis and advocate for health justice
Oct. 12, 2025
A new student-led team at the University of Kansas is joining the fight against tuberculosis in Sierra Leone and pushing for international health justice through the global organization Partners in Health.
The KU chapter, founded in August by pre-med senior Bhavya Gupta, is one of many college-based teams nationwide raising money and advocating for U.S. support of international health programs. Partners in Health aims to raise $130,000 this year across its network.
Tuberculosis remains one of the world’s deadliest infectious diseases. A September 2025 study from PLOS Global Public Health estimates 2.2 million people in high-risk countries, including Sierra Leone, could die from tuberculosis in the next five years if U.S. funding delays continue.
Gupta said she created the KU chapter after being inspired by Paul Farmer, the late founder of Partners in Health, whose work she studied in professor Kevin McCannon’s Sociology of Global Health course last spring.
She said Farmer’s dedication, including a story about walking six hours in rural Haiti to deliver medicine to a patient, motivated her to take action.
“It was inspiring, but was also just kind of like, OK, this is actually possible,” Gupta said. “Maybe one day even I could do something like that.”
By August, Gupta was in Washington, D.C., training with Partners in Health and meeting with congressional staff in both the Senate and House chambers to advocate for global health funding.
One of the organization’s key goals is to urge Congress to release $1.25 billion in frozen U.S. contributions to the Global Fund, an international program that fights tuberculosis, AIDS and malaria.
Sophomore chemistry major Helinna Bontrager, the team’s advocacy leader, said KU volunteers have already started emailing members of Congress, sometimes using Gupta’s D.C. connections to press for renewed support.
McCannon, who advises the group, said learning how to navigate policymaking and advocacy is one of the group's biggest challenges.
“Whether you’re successful at it or not, it’s kind of not the point,” McCannon said. “It’s getting an understanding of how this world works.”
The team will hold its next meetings Oct. 23 and Nov. 20 at 6:30 p.m. in the Kansas Union’s Parlor C, led by Gupta, Bontrager, Youngha Rissler and Isabelle Scheidel, a team of all-female undergraduate students.
Rissler, who is pre-law, hopes to become a human rights lawyer focused on gender-based violence.
Bontrager, Gupta and Scheidel plan to pursue medical careers that incorporate health justice principles.
“I really, really, really, really want to go abroad at one point and be able to deliver health care in different countries around the world,” Gupta said. “There’s no way that there’s a future that I won’t ever be doing that.”