Medical student Kate Dickman doesn't have a lone tragic tale to tell from her work last summer at a pediatric infectious disease ward in West Kenya.

There were 60 children under the care of one doctor, each with a compelling story so moving that plucking one from her memory would mean the others never counted.

"There was so much disease, poverty and desperate need that I just felt like we had to do something," she said.

So Dickman, 24, is returning to Kenya. She left last week with two friends and classmates from the University of Pittsburgh, money for medical supplies, a blueprint for a system to monitor patients and a hope that somehow they can slow the spread of HIV/AIDS in one portion of rural Africa.

This is the first group of Pitt medical students to go to Kenya, said Dickman, who was part of a separate research project there last year. During the past year she and her friends have raised $13,000 and kept in touch with doctors a world away as they developed a method for Kenyan physicians to monitor and track HIV/AIDS effectively.

Even though they are only second-year medical students, the group is trying to establish their project as a training ground for students who choose to follow in their footsteps. The link, they say, would be invaluable in learning how to deal with patients and stopping the spread of the AIDS virus on the continent that has been hit hardest by the disease.

Doctors in Siaya, the rural area of several villages the students are helping, estimate large numbers of children there are infected with HIV. The estimates are not exact because comprehensive HIV/AIDS testing is not available. The area hospital has no records tracking which children have symptoms and which don't, complicating an official count of AIDS in the region.

"That's why its important to start a standard intake system," said Krista Pfaendler, one of the students going to Siaya. Pfaendler along with Kasia Mastalera and Dickman have been working on a questionnaire that could become a staple intake procedure for the doctors and nurses at the hospital.

In Kenya, more than 100,000 children live with the disease. Dr. Marian Michaels, director of the Pediatric HIV Center at Children's Hospital, visited Siaya and is the students' mentor.

Michaels said African children with AIDS have been an afterthought, as health officials grapple with the burgeoning sub-Saharan adult population that accounts for more than 90 percent of the globe's AIDS cases. Children, however, are more vulnerable to the disease, Michaels said.

HIV infection may take years to develop into AIDS in adults, but the infection can progress rapidly in children, particularly when other infectious diseases are present, she said.

"When you think about the effects of HIV in Africa, you must think of malaria, you must think about tuberculosis," Michaels said. "You have to think about the disease as a triad."

That's why the students are buying supplies like face masks, mosquito nets and even spigots for water jugs. By slowing the reach of infectious disease, the students allow children and those infected with HIV a chance at prolonged life.

"These things sound so little, but they are the key things to survival," Michaels said. "These are the things that don't let people die with HIV."

While AIDS death rates are improving in some of the developed world, the rates are only getting worse in sub-Saharan nations. Officials at UNICEF say only a minuscule portion of the world's children have access to anti-retroviral drugs.

"Half million children die from HIV every year," said Oliver Phillips, spokesman for UNICEF. "That means every minute a child dies from HIV/AIDS."