Posted on November 13, 2013
BALTIMORE - Johns Hopkins HIV/AIDS experts were awarded more than $5 million grants for training in India and Africa.
HIV/AIDS experts at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the university’s Bloomberg School of Public Health have been awarded the grants by the Fogarty International Center’s HIV Research Training Program.
The award will be spread over five years and provide health and medical research skills in India, Uganda, Ethiopia and Malawi and will focus on places hit hard by the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
Currently, HIV/AIDS is estimated to infect about 33.4 million people worldwide, Hopkins said.
As a part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), four Johns Hopkins awards were among 22 grants announced by Fogarty in October 2013.
According to Fogarty officials, the new funding will be used to train more than 50 undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral research scientists and lab technologists in efforts to develop and upgrade the health and medical research infrastructure in the selected countries.
“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 country’s most heavily burdened by the pandemic,” said Fogarty grant recipient Robert Bollinger in a statement.
Researchers say the added local skills are essential to the success of much other U.S. government funded HIV/AIDS initiatives aimed at preventing and treating people with the disease.
The awards are supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Cancer Institute, National Institute on Drug Abuse and all parts of the National Institute of Health.
