He’s still at it: AIDS research pioneer who made Ethiopia healthier

As a member of the prize committee for the Israel branch of the Society for International Development’s 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award, I helped to choose Professor Zvi Bentwich, 89. Prof. Bentwich was the first to deal with AIDS in Israel and has helped to eradicate diseases of poverty in Ethiopia by raising awareness about the importance of clean sanitation and hygiene. Prof Bentwich, who, at age 89, is planning further research, received his award on January 13.

Still fired up by a burning curiosity and desire to fix the world at 89, Prof Zvi Bentwich swims and cycles each morning before getting down to his latest research.

A physician, researcher and educator, he set up Israel’s first treatment center and laboratory for AIDS. Eager to test whether the impact of certain preventable tropical diseases on the immune system made people more susceptible to HIV, he set up a hygiene program in Ethiopian schools that has since been adopted by that country’s government and will be copied by more governments in Africa, helping millions.

On receiving a lifetime award from the Israel branch of the Society for International Development, he said, “The vision to influence and bring change to millions of people, most of the population of Ethiopia, is one that I didn’t believe I would see realized. I grew up on the idea of repairing the world in the image of God. …People say we are the Chosen People, not to give us advantages, but to demand from us more than others. And one of the ways is what [we’re] doing and what we try to do.”

Bentwich, who also holds a 2010 life achievement award from the Knesset for his contributions to Israeli medicine and medical sciences, is hoping to start piloting a new project in the coming year involving immigrants from Ethiopia.

Research that he and others have carried out over the years has shown that infection with intestinal worms affects sufferers’ immune systems. This not only protects the worms themselves. It reduces the carriers’ resistance to diseases such as polio and diphtheria, even after being vaccinated against them, and suppresses their response to irritants that cause asthma and allergies. Bentwich discovered several years ago that Ethiopians who arrived in Israel with disproportionally little asthma and allergies compared to the general Israeli population exhibited more of both a year after their intestinal worms had been treated.

The pilot he hopes to start will take a sample of immigrants who have been in the country for several years. It will test to see how many people still carry worms, and will treat them.

Of more global significance, it will probe, through health fund records, the extent to which those cured of worms in the past have developed allergies, asthma, or auto-immune diseases such as Crohn’s Disease.

‘Fear was a big part of the battle we fought’

Bentwich was born in Jerusalem, educated partly in Haifa, studied medicine at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University Medical School, and served as a physician in the Israeli Air Force, helping to establish the combat rescue unit, 669.

He trained in internal medicine at Jerusalem’s Hadassah University Hospital, and carried out research in immunology in Israel and the US, later leaving a senior lectureship post at Hadassah to run the internal medicine department at Kaplan Hospital in Rehovot in south-central Israel.

Prof Zvi Bentwich

In 1982, just a year after the first reported case of AIDS in the US, the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot referred an African AIDS patient to Bentwich for a treatment (unsuccessful) that the institute had developed.

This changed his life trajectory. He set up Israel’s first center for the treatment of AIDS and a dedicated laboratory, eventually securing a large donation to create the “Neve Or” institute at Kaplan, which still cares for HIV patients and carriers. He secured the hospital’s agreement for sufferers to be identified by number rather than name.

The model of basing treatment on research and using treatment for further research has marked his career, along with the experience he gained in the early years of AIDS in raising public awareness. In the 1980s, the public, including many hospital workers, were terrified of contracting HIV through touch, even though the medical profession understood early on that transmission was via direct contact with blood and other bodily fluids. Bentwich recalls sitting on the bed of an AIDS patient and touching him to prove to worried ultrasound staff that it was safe to operate the monitor.

Grade 9 students from the Sieff (Ziv) School in Jerusalem attend an aids prevention class, June 16, 2003. (Flash90)

“I recruited the medical establishment and the government by explaining the disease and how best to treat it, not by frightening people,” he told The Times of Israel, adding that he had written a book about his experiences with AIDS which will be published.

“Fear was a big part of the battle we fought. Around 40 million people died, mostly in Africa,” he said. “During the first 15 years, 99% of those infected died. Today there are roughly 30 million who carry the virus. They get treatment and can live almost normal lives. It’s the biggest medical success of the last century.”

Bentwich said he wished more lessons from the AIDS epidemic had been applied to the outbreak of COVID-19, which began five years ago this week. One lesson would have been not to impose draconian shutdowns on schools once it was understood that those at risk were not children, but the elderly people and people with pre-existing conditions, he explained. Another would have been to allow family members to visit and support infected relatives in the hospital.

The shift to Ethiopia

The first phase of Bentwich’s work was with members of Tel Aviv’s gay community. Then, from 1984, large numbers of Ethiopian Jews infected with AIDS started immigrating. Researching the development of the disease, he realized that many of the infected newcomers also suffered from internal worms that impacted their immune systems. It was this that shifted his life’s focus to Ethiopia, and to the challenge of eradicating tropical illnesses caused by parasitic worms.

Illustrative: Israelis from Ethiopia pray during the Sigd holiday on the Armon Hanatziv Promenade, Jerusalem, November 28, 2024. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

He began to publish papers on the subject in 1996, and in the early 2000s moved to Ben Gurion University of the Negev, where he established and still heads the Center for Emerging Diseases, Tropical Diseases and AIDS, with special emphasis on so-called Neglected Tropical Diseases, otherwise known as diseases of poverty. Associated with a lack of clean water and poor sanitation and hygiene, and affecting over a billion people in the developing world, preventable conditions such as intestinal worms and bilharzia can lead to blindness, malnutrition, and disability, with women and children particularly vulnerable.

In this undated photograph, a community health worker talks to schoolchildren in Ethiopia about schistosomiasis, how to recognize the symptoms, avoid contracting it, and minimize transmission, as part of a joint project between the NALA Foundation and Merck KGaA. The children were asked to share the information with their families and communities to drive awareness and prevention efforts. (Marcus Perkins for Merck KGaA)

“When I got to Ethiopia, I saw there were lots of huge organizations dealing with worms by dispensing drugs,” Bentwich recalled. “But they weren’t dealing with the fact that people would get infected again. I understood that we had to change behavior, recruit the community, and get the government support to prevent recurrence.”

In 2011, Bentwich founded, and still serves as president of, the NALA Foundation, which he describes as a “concrete realization of my vision for Tikkun Olam [repairing the world] through the successful elimination of NTDs by an Israel-based organization.”

Community health workers in Ethiopia review the NALA Foundation’s flip book resource on health, hygiene, and disease prevention, May 2022. (Courtesy, NALA Foundation)

From mapping the location of certain species of bilharzia-hosting snails along rivers, and increasing the numbers of latrines and washing stations with clean water and soap, to educating schoolchildren and staff about hygiene, and training mobile maintenance technicians, local officials, health workers, religious and community leaders, the NALA Foundation has achieved an average 90% reduction of intestinal parasite infection within targeted communities, following up to ensure the diseases don’t return.

A stool surveyor from Mizan Tepi University in southwest Ethiopia uses humor to engage children and encourage them to consider providing stool samples to gauge the prevalence of schistosomiasis (bilharzia) in the area and identify people needing immediate treatment. This formed part of a joint project between the NALA Foundation and Merck KGaA in 2018. (Marcus Perkins for Merck KGaA)

With the Ethiopian government now implementing the programs countrywide, the NALA Foundation estimates that it has reached more than 10 million people in that country alone. Other African nations are now requesting the NALA model too. Said Bentwich, “We’ve demonstrated a model that, for the first time doesn’t only look at drugs but behavioral change as well.”

An heir to curiosity

Bentwich believes a successful 40-year marriage (yielding five children) has helped his success, and that his “curiosity, stubbornness, vision, and will to fight for what I believe in” are largely inherited from his storied ancestors.

His paternal grandfather, Herbert Bentwich, was a leading British Zionist who eventually settled in Jerusalem. His maternal grandfather was Hillel Yaffe, a Russian-Jewish physician, who played a key role in the cure and prevention of malaria in Palestine over a century ago.

Bentwich’s uncle, Norman, a British lawyer, served as the first attorney-general of Mandatory Palestine. Ironically in light of Zvi Bentwich’s work in Africa, Norman Bentwich was invited by Emperor Haille Selassie to draw up a constitution for Ethiopia after the British had defeated the Italians in Abyssinia in 1942. According to Zvi Bentwich, his uncle tried unsuccessfully to persuade Israel’s leaders at the time to bring Ethiopia’s Jews to the Jewish state. “When I started to get involved with Ethiopia, I met Jews there who remembered Norman as the Messiah,” he said.

While still enjoying good health for an 89-year-old, Bentwich has begun a new chapter of research, having observed that Jewish immigrants from Ethiopia arrived with very little asthma or allergies, but that these increased after their intestinal worms had been treated.

“Some of this can be transient. But it’s an open question,” he said. “What about autoimmune diseases, and even cancer? We are going to do research through the NALA Foundation among immigrants from Ethiopia to see what happens after the worms have gone. It will be of interest to the whole world.”