
HIV and STI Surveillance in Eastern and Southern Africa
Project Overview
We work on a variety of epidemiological studies focused on HIV/STI transmission dynamics and the impact of treatment and prevention interventions. Our research largely takes place in eastern and southern Africa, but we also collaborate on domestic initiatives, including with the HIV Prevention Trials Network.
The Rakai Health Sciences Program (RHSP) and the Rakai Community Cohort Study (RCCS): The RHSP was established in 1987 as a collaboration between researchers at Makerere, Columbia and John Hopkins Universities, the Division of Intramural Research at the National Institutes of Allergy & Infectious diseases and the International Centre for Excellence Research (ICER). Today, the Rakai Health Sciences Program is an HIV research and service organization, operating predominately in south-central Uganda. The RHSP conducts the RCCS, which is the longest-running and among the largest population-based HIV surveillance cohorts in eastern Africa. The RCCS surveys ~20,000 participants aged 15 years and above in 40 communities in Uganda every two years. Longitudinal and cross-sectional data are available from >300,000 individuals surveyed since 1994 with stored biospecimens. The RHSP is also a PEPFAR implementing partner, providing and facilitating HIV services in more than 200 clinics across southern Uganda and Lake Victoria. More information here.
PANGEA-HIV: PANGEA stands for "Phylogenetics And Networks for Generalised Epidemics in Africa", and is a pan-African HIV deep sequencing initiative funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The overarching goal of the PANGEA consortium is to identify individual and population level factors that drive the epidemic using HIV-1 phylogenetic data, analyse the dynamics of the epidemic, and translate these findings into information that can be used to more effectively target interventions. PANGEA consists of many partners in Africa, Europe and the US, including Johns Hopkins University. The PANGEA database holds >32,000 NGS sequence files from sub-Saharan Africa with basic epidemiological metadata associated with them. For some cohorts, extensive metadata is available. More information here.
