EAST LANSING, Mich. – Michigan State University researchers will use a grant from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation to explore the barriers AIDS patients in rural Africa encounter when trying to access life-saving medications, as well as look for ways to overcome barriers to treatment.
The two-year grant is worth $200,000.
“While many more people on the African continent are now getting treatments for HIV and AIDS than in past years, an extremely large number, especially those living in rural areas, are dying due to lack of care,” said Gretchen Birbeck, an MSU associate professor of neurology and ophthalmology and epidemiology who serves as principal investigator of the project.
Working in a rural southern province of Zambia, a land-locked country in southern Africa, Birbeck and her team will investigate the roles socioeconomic status, HIV-related stigma and pretreatment neurologic disorders play in a patient’s ability to access antiretroviral therapies used to treat AIDS.
AIDS treatment in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly the use of antiretroviral therapy, or ARTs, is finally becoming more broadly available, Birbeck said.
“The initial rollout of ARTs occurred primarily at urban health-care facilities, usually large teaching hospitals,” she said. “However, a third to a half of the people living with AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa reside in rural regions that are too distant from the cities to access AIDS-related care there. Now, ARTs is slowly becoming available through clinics located in rural regions of Zambia.”
Birbeck serves as director of MSU’s International Neurologic and Psychiatric Epidemiology Program and spends several months a year in Zambia and Malawi treating patients and conducting research.
Much of her work focuses on epilepsy, including its relationship to malaria and the stigma that surrounds epilepsy in Zambian culture.
The grant comes from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation’s first Operations Research on AIDS Care and Treatment in Africa competition and is designed to improve AIDS care and treatment in Africa. The 2005 competition attracted 73 proposals from investigators or teams of investigators working with AIDS health care providers in 18 African countries. A panel of experts reviewed the proposals and recommended 16 teams for funding.
The mission of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation is to improve the quality of people’s lives through grants supporting the performing arts, wildlife conservation, medical research and the prevention of child maltreatment.
For more information, visit the Web at www.ddcf.org/