The Johns Hopkins Gazette: February 24, 2003
February 24, 2003
VOL. 32, NO. 23

  

JHU Consortium Awarded $4 Million to Develop HIV Programs

Johns Hopkins Gazette Online Edition

A consortium of Johns Hopkins schools and affiliates, led by JHPIEGO, will assist Health and Human Services' Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to implement a worldwide initiative to reduce transmission of the HIV virus from mothers to their children.

Under a five-year $4 million grant from CDC, the consortium will develop model training and service delivery programs that will enable communities around the world to build and sustain their response to the AIDS epidemic.

The principal investigator for the grant is physician Jean Anderson, JHPIEGO's HIV/ AIDS adviser and editor of A Guide to the Clinical Care of Women with HIV, published by HHS' Health Resources and Services Administration. The other university entities with which Anderson will work closely are the schools of Medicine, Nursing and Public Health; the Center for Communication Programs; and the Academic Alliance for AIDS Care and Prevention in Africa.

Kai Spratt, head of JHPIEGO's recently created Office of HIV/AIDS, said, "This is a university grant. We will access the expertise of ongoing research at Johns Hopkins to design programs that can be adapted to meet the prevention and treatment needs of each community."

Spratt said that JHPIEGO's expertise in HIV/AIDS programs worldwide would enable it to help CDC scale up the Global AIDS Program in priority countries. These programs will focus on preventing mother-to-child transmission of HIV infection, care and treatment of mothers and newborns, and evaluation and assessment of the effectiveness of program implementation.

JHPIEGO and its partners currently administer a wide range of HIV/AIDS prevention, treatment and counseling programs and infection prevention initiatives in Zambia, Ghana, Kenya, Benin, South Africa, Ethiopia and the Caribbean.

The overall objectives of CDC's Global AIDS Program are to reduce HIV transmission through primary prevention of sexual, mother-to-child and blood transmission; improve community- and home-based care and treatment of HIV and sexually transmitted diseases and opportunistic infections; and strengthen the capacity of countries to collect and use surveillance data to manage national HIV/AIDS programs.


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