Multi-million Rand grant to further HIV research
‘We believe this grant will enable us to take our research to the next level'
HIV intervention research in KwaZulu-Natal was recently bolstered when two professors received a five-year, multi-million Rand grant.
This brings the duo’s highly successful collaboration on cutting edge research into its second decade.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded the grant of up to R40-million to UKZN’s College of Health Science Professor Frank Tanser, who is based at the Wellcome Trust’s Africa Centre for Population Health in Somkhele, and Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health’s Professor Till Bärnighausen.
Building on two previous grants, the new project is funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and aims to reduce high rates of HIV-related mortality among men and reduce high levels of HIV incidence among young women.
The project seeks to use a cutting-edge micro-incentive intervention to recruit more men into care and onto lifesaving anti-retroviral therapy.
If successful, the intervention will ensure that men in particular will enter ART treatment programmes much earlier and in greater numbers.
This in turn will lead to higher levels of HIV viral suppression among men, thereby preventing HIV transmission to women.
‘We believe this grant will enable us to take our research to the next level and it gives us a real opportunity to intervene in the most vulnerable groups,’ said Tanser.
The intervention to be developed and tested comprises three key components, namely it is home-based, it offers small financial incentives, and offers gender-specific enhanced advice and counselling to motivate linkage and retention in care.
The expected outcome of this work is a developed and evaluated targeted intervention to drive back the HIV epidemic in HIV hyper endemic communities in southern Africa.
‘We are grateful that the NIH has again recognised that our research at the Africa Centre has the potential to find solutions to the most pressing problems related to HIV today,’ said Bärnighausen.
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