US awards grant for AIDS and TB research

Uganda is one of the four countries to benefit from a $12 million grant from the US to carry out further HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis (TB) research and training, the US embassy in the capital, Kampala, said on World AIDS Day. "The project will broaden the national capacity to meet the public health and scientific challenges of the evolving HIV and TB epidemic in Uganda," an embassy statement said. "Infrastructure will be developed in Uganda to translate basic and clinical research findings into public health policy and interventions and to evaluate their effectiveness." A Ugandan researcher, Peter Mugyenyi, of the Joint Clinical Research Centre in Kampala, will work with researchers from America's Case Western Reserve University on the research. Other countries benefiting from the research grant include China, Haiti and Russia. "These first four sites will provide critically needed training in the design and conduct of AIDS and TB research, to scale-up promising interventions as they are brought into health care systems," the statement added. The programme would support collaborative and multidisciplinary research training in the countries where the two epidemics have taken an enormous toll on individuals, families and communities. "This program will play an important role in meeting the training needs in countries struggling to gain control of the scourge of AIDS," said Sharon Hrynkow, acting director of the Fogarty International Center, in the statement. "These first four sites will provide critically needed training in the design and conduct of AIDS and TB research to scale-up promising interventions as they are brought into health care systems." Since 1983, a million Ugandans have died from AIDS-related illnesses and the same number is estimated to be living with the virus. However, due to an intensive campaign against the epidemic, the country's prevalence rate - that used to run as high as 30 percent in the early 1990s - has been brought down to about 6 percent.