Dear All,
I am interested in establishing collaborations for research in HIV\AIDS in Cameroon. I am presently catering for over 1000 HIV positive cases including treatment-naive, treatment-experienced and multiple-treatment failure cases.
I am presently working with a number of centres in Europe on Hepatitis B; however I have a bigger passion for work in HIV\AIDS and sickle cell anaemia.
I have staff with experience in field work (blood sample collection, PCR testing, viral culture and cloning). We have the responsibility of getting ethical clearance and informed consents locally.
I believe a lot of work and information can be obtained if we studied cases out here.
Anyone who is interested or knows any links please contact me.
Okwen P Mbah.
mailto:okwenpatrick@yahoo.fr
Dear Dr Mbah,
I saw your note to afro-nets. I'm sure you are getting lots of responses. There is a lot to do.
I have a suggestion for research. Unfortunately for us, I don't have money to offer along with this suggestion, but here goes, anyways.
The recent demographic and health survey in Cameroon found that more than 2/3rds of couples with HIV in one or both partners were discordant. Moreover, 53% of married women with HIV had an HIV- husband.
This poses not only an epidemiological question how were they infected? -- but also a challenge to prevent misunderstanding of the HIV epidemic from damaging marriages and relationships. Some HIV infections come from sex, but not all.
I propose a research project that works with women identified as HIV+ during antenatal care (as part of prevention of mother-to-child transmission), with the following components:
(a) a revised questionnaire about risks, that asks the women thoroughly about blood exposures (tattoos, dental care, medical injections, shaving in the market, etc) along with sexual exposures;
(b) inviting husbands to come for tests, and administering the same revised questionnaire, asking thoroughly about blood exposures along with sexual exposures;
(c) individual and joint counseling that emphasizes that HIV is not a reliable sign of sexual behavior, and that enlists the help of those who are infected to identify blood borne risks.
The overall design of this proposal would be: Learning from and respecting PLWHA, and not assuming that HIV infection is a sign (stigmata) of sexual promiscuity.
If you are interested, I can send supporting materials. With Mariette Correa in India we have worked out an alternate questionnaire for VCTs.
Best regards,
David
--
David Gisselquist
mailto:david_gisselquist@yahoo.com
David,
Your idea sounds interesting. I worked in an HIV clinic in Yaounde Cameroon for close to 5 years and saw a large number of discordant couples. My team where able to counsel and reassure many of these couples to accept and live with their prevailing predicament. In most cases, it was very difficult to establish if the victim was involved in an unsafe extra-marital affair. It will be interesting to carry out such a study but then recognizing the fact that most of the cases will always lay blame to other forms of exposure and perhaps rightly so, given the degree of stigmatization out there.
Cheers
Dr Richard G Caspa
School of Epid. and public health
University of Nottingham, UK
mailto:gcaspa@yahoo.co.uk