HIV/AIDS at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Medicine and the university’s Bloomberg School of Public Health have been awarded more than $5 million by the Fogarty International Centre’s HIV Research Training Program to foster health and medical research skills in India, Uganda, Ethiopia and Malawi.

The training funds, to be spread over five years, focus on places hard hit by the HIV/AIDS pandemic, currently estimated to infect some 33.4 million people worldwide.

Four Johns Hopkins awards were among 22 grants announced in October 2013 by Fogarty, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The new funding will be used to train more than 50 undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral research scientists, as well as lab technologists, as part of a broader effort to develop and upgrade the health and medical research infrastructure in these countries, according to Fogarty officials.

Such added local skills, researchers say, are essential to the success of many other US government-funded HIV/AIDS initiatives aimed at preventing and treating people with the disease.

Among the Johns Hopkins faculty serving as principal investigators of the awards are Dr Robert Bollinger (HIV-TB Fogarty Research Training Program in India), Dr Ronald Gray (Male Circumcision and Use of Foreskin Tissues for HIV Prevention in Uganda), Dr Andrea Ruff (Optimizing HIV Prevention in Ethiopia through Implementation Science) and Dr Taha Taha (Training in HIV-related Non-communicable Disease Complications in Malawi).

“These training grants are desperately needed to assemble the critical mass of medical research personnel necessary to plan, organize, implement and monitor how we battle HIV disease in the countries most heavily burdened by the pandemic,” said Fogarty grant recipient Dr Robert Bollinger, a professor at Johns Hopkins and director of its Centre for Clinical Global Health Education.

Source: India Medical Times