At an age when most people divide their time between putting their feet up and visiting their grandchildren, Martha MacGuffie is still working 18-hour days trying to save the world.

The 74-year-old plastic surgeon gave a series of talks in Bermuda on the weekend about her work in Africa.

It won her a Lions Humanitarian Award and the Hamilton branch are sponsoring her visit.

Dr. MacGuffie spends around six weeks a year in Kenya where she set up the Society for Hospital Recourses and Exchange or SHARE.

SHARE provides general medical care, surgery and treatment for AIDS in Kenya where one in three people suffer from the disease.

And the latter subject is close to her heart after two of her eight sons died from the disease when they were given contaminated blood from transfusions.

"It's frustrating fighting an epidemic you can't see,'' she confessed, "and if you do manage to find it, there's no cure.

"As a doctor it's frustrating -as a mother it's heartbreaking.'' The New Yorker says: "Our government feels there isn't really a problem with AIDS because now we have drugs and we're going to find a vaccine.

"Yet AIDS is the greatest killer of men in the United States between the ages of 27 and 45. We have a crisis of complacency and confidentiality.

"AIDS is not just a disease of Haitains, Africans, homosexuals and drug abusers. It is a disease of all of us, the plague of the new Millennium.

"It just might wipe out our younger generation.'' Dr. MacGuffie had planned to be a missionary in Africa all her life but she finally went in 1987.

She said: "I was delayed by World War Two. Then I got married and had children. Forty years later, after the last child had finished college, I finally got to go.'' Now she wears a machine gun bullet round her neck as a reminder of the continent.

She says: "We removed it from the hip of a 15-month-old Rwandan child whose mother was shot through the heart while holding the child in her arms.

"I wear it constantly to remind me that two million innocent children have died there in the last ten years from ethnic, religious and territorial fighting.'' When not in Africa or raising money for it, Dr. MacGuffie works in hospitals near her home continuing her illustrious medical career.

She invented a pioneering scar cream to aid burns victims and she focused on that when she first went to Africa before becoming more involved with the AIDS problem.

Dudley Cottingham, of the Hamilton Lions, explained: "They often cook round an open fire there so you get children falling in and getting awful burns.

"Then she became aware of the AIDS problem which orphans a lot of children.

One parent will get it and then of course the other gets it.

"Dr. MacGuffie started a foster home and raises cash for it.

"She also raises money to buy basic medicine. I saw her speak in New York and she showed the audience a photo of a girl with a disease which made her look absolutely grotesque but all she needed was simple medicine.

"Dr. MacGuffie then showed a picture taken of the child after 18 weeks of treatment and she was the most gorgeous looking girl.'' The public had the chance to hear her speak at the Windreach Recreational Village activity centre on Saturday evening.

She will also speak to the morning assembly of the Bermuda High School for Girls today before flying home.

HEALTH HTH