Nigerian Hospital May Benefit from Designs : Medicine: A nonprofit group has commissioned 13 college students to draft plans for a $650,000 expansion of the facility in Tamou, a village fighting river blindness.

Pasadena college student Christopher Lum was horrified when he heard that barefoot blind men stumble for miles through West Africa’s savanna, only to reach a primitive two-room adobe hospital in the dreary bush land.

The 25-year-old senior at Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design learned that victims of the crippling “river blindness” disease near Tamou, Niger, have nowhere else to go for help. River blindness, or onchocerciasis, is one of the world’s major parasitic diseases; it can also leave victims severely disfigured.

As a design innovations class project, Lum and 12 classmates are working with an Anaheim philanthropic foundation on exterior designs for a $650,000 expansion of Tamou’s hospital. Next year, hospital administrators are anticipating visits from thousands of river blindness victims when the hospital begins a free program to distribute a pill that protects infected people from developing new symptoms. The village’s hospital, built in 1955, has no electricity or water, and only the barest of supplies, including five hypodermic needles that are washed and reused.

The students are designing huge, symbolic entryways and other outside structures, such as shade and waiting areas. Lum’s design was based on the anticipated trek of thousands of villagers toward Tamou. The journey reminded him of natural migrations, such as those by schools of fish or flocks of birds. So he designed an entryway of kite-shaped canvas flags on aluminum posts, 3 to 24 feet tall. The flags progress from white to bright colors, symbolizing a journey from the paleness of the ill to the rosy hues of the healthy.

The concept, said Lum, touched his heart the way other school projects--such as designing furniture and small houses--do not.

“We’re helping fellow human beings get the medical attention they need,” he said. “I feel good about it. It’s a cause--you’re not just doing it to build a name for yourself or sell yourself.”

Said his instructor, Steve Diskin: “It’s time for designers to start working for the benefit of humanity.”

In January, 1994, Diskin, an assistant and a student in the class will visit Tamou to help with the renovations, which are expected to be completed within 30 days. Their expenses will be paid for by the Phoebus Foundation, a nonprofit organization with projects in developing countries. Diskin and Phoebus Foundation President Michael G. van Hoye will pick a student’s design or a combination of designs in the next couple of weeks. The winning designer will get the free trip to Tamou, where 1,500 of 2,500 villagers are afflicted by the disease.

River blindness is spread by tiny black flies. The tropical disease robs villagers of their sight, forcing them to get children to lead them to the fields so that they can feel for stalks of millet or sorghum. Entire communities have fled the black fly and abandoned their riverside villages for less-fertile areas; widespread food shortages have resulted.

The carrier black flies breed in fast-moving water and carry a parasitic worm larva. The flies feast on human blood, similar to the way mosquitoes do. People who suffer from the bites are infected with the parasite. The larvae grow into worms up to two feet long inside the human body and produce offspring. The offspring swarm through the body, causing severe itching, disfigurement and, after some years, blindness.

An estimated 18 million people suffer from river blindness in Africa, and parts of Latin America and the Middle East, according to the World Health Organization. More than 1 million have been left blind or visually impaired.

WHO and other international relief agencies have been fighting the centuries-old scourge on two fronts: through an insecticide spraying program that began in 1974, and distribution of the drug ivermectin.

Ivermectin, which is also used against livestock parasites, eradicates the worm larvae from the body and halts symptoms. One tablet a year is usually enough. Visitors to affected areas also take the drug as a sort of vaccination--if they get bitten, ivermectin prevents the worm larvae from developing. The drug has been donated to WHO since 1988 by its American manufacturer, Merck & Co. of Rahway, N.J. More than 4 million free tablets have been distributed, said Dan Epstein, a WHO spokesman in Washington.

But distributing the tablets and educating villagers on how the medicine works is a mammoth task. That’s where the Phoebus Foundation came in. The nonprofit foundation will spend a total of $2.2 million in the next two years on the hospital renovation project and the building of five clinics, van Hoye said. The renovation project includes a complete interior overhaul of the Tamou hospital, including the addition of a triage ward and maternity unit. The foundation will hire hundreds of villagers to work on the construction and train 400 more to work as medical technicians, distributing the pills and dispensing health advice.

The Art Center’s involvement began when van Hoye read a profile on the college in Design World magazine in January. Among its many honors, the Art Center was recently ranked second among the nation’s art and design colleges in U.S. News & World Report’s “America’s Best Colleges” issue. First was Juilliard School of Performing Arts in New York City.

Impressed with the college’s credentials, van Hoye hooked up with Diskin, who started a class called Project X in 1992. In Project X, which is offered by the environmental design and product design departments, students research trends in building materials and energy sources, and alternatives to conventional architecture. Most students do not have backgrounds in architecture, said Diskin, who has a master’s degree in architecture from Harvard University. But he helps students with the technical parts of building design, while they come up with the conceptual architecture on their own.

This semester’s Project X began Sept. 15. Students are making scale-model renderings of their concepts on huge sheets of foam board, using pieces of window screen, balsa wood, cardboard and other materials. During a recent class, students sat in a semicircle on metal stools and critiqued each project.

Senior Denise Orr’s design included an outside plaza, where visitors could wait and find shade. On the hottest days in Tamou, the temperature can hit 120 degrees. Students liked her semi-enclosed plaza design but took issue with her use of reinforced straw bales for the outside walls--goats, someone suggested, would eat them.

Her design also includes layered wire-mesh sun deflectors, curved like the bow of a ship and tilting on an axis with the sun. The concept, she said, is simplicity.

“It’s because their lives are simple,” said Orr, 21. “Everything they have is built around their hands and their bodies. It’s what I tried to do--it’s proportional to them and to their culture. Here we get these skyscrapers where you need 50,000 people to build it for you. I wanted something they can build themselves.”