CAPS International Program
Newsletter
January,
2003
Issue
#18
We at the CAPS
International Program would like to take
the opportunity to wish you all a very healthy and prosperous 2003!
First, news from
this past year. Our newly-updated CAPS
Visiting Scientist Program with a focus on intervention research,
welcomed its
first group of eight visiting scientists this past summer. The theme
was
clinic-based interventions, and pilot research protocols generated
during the
summer program were designed as intervention studies. In a departure
from past
years, we invited applicants to the program from among our program
alumni as
well as others with comparable research training backgrounds and/or
experience,
rather than recruiting program attendees through an open-application
process.
We also focused on a smaller number of target countries in order to
build upon
ongoing research work of both our faculty and program alumni. Two of
our eight
visiting scientists were program alumni – Patchara Rumakom (nee
Benjarattanaporn) from Thailand, and Ly Penh Sun from Cambodia. Our
other
program attendees hailed from Brazil, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Uganda,
and
India.
For the summer
of 2003, our focus will be on intervention
research among hard-to-reach populations. We remain open to inquiries
from our
program alumni as well as scientists who have not been through the CAPS
summer
program. However, all potential applicants must be screened by our
Regional
Coordinators (Dr. Lindan for Asia, Dr. Page-Shafer for Latin America,
Dr.
McFarland for Africa, Dr. Novotny for Eastern Europe). We are happy to
welcome
Dr. Tom Novotny to our International program faculty; he will be our
Regional
Coordinator for Eastern Europe and will help to build upon our
programming in
this region. He recently completed a study for the World Bank on the
need for
prevention in the low-HIV prevalence Balkan countries. Tom is a family
physician and epidemiologist.
[We include as
an attachment to this newsletter the
application for this summer’s program. We strongly advise that if you
are
interested in applying for this summer’s program, you should write a
brief
letter (email is fine) of interest to us first before completing and
submitting
the application.]
During 2002, a
number of our program alumni returned for
writing sabbaticals – from China, South Africa and Brazil. We
successfully
published ten articles by our program alumni and international program
faculty
in the September 2002 edition of AIDS and
Behavior. We are preparing a mailing of this journal to all of our
alumni
and to the AIDS control programs of those countries whose AIDS
situations are
highlighted in these papers. Other alumni were successful in getting
articles
accepted in such prestigious journals as AIDS,
the British Medical Journal, and the Lancet.
We continue to
expand our international activities to
include in-country training. We are in the second year of a grant
funded from
the National Institutes of Health’s Fogarty International Center to
support the
work of the Centro de Estudos de Aids de Rio Grande do Sul (CEARGS) in
Porto
Alegre, Brazil. This grant supports two Brazilian visiting scientists
at CAPS
each summer as well as in-country training activities in Porto Alegre.
Last
December, faculty from CEARGS, the Fundação Faculdade
Federal de Ciências
Médicas de Porto Alegre (FFCMPA) and CAPS held a two week
research methods
course at FFFCMPA in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Participants came both from
FFFCMPA
and from state and local health departments throughout Brazil. Sixty
students
participated in the morning lecture portions of the course and 14 in
the
afternoon protocol-writing sessions. If our
Brazilian alumni have colleagues whom they would like to refer to Dr.
Mauro
Ramos, the director of CEARGS, please contact him at dermauro@goethe111.com.br.
The CEARGS web site can be viewed at http://www.goethe111.com.br/ceargs/home.html.
The XIV
International Conference
on AIDS in Barcelona was attended by many of our program alumni and
friends.
Our program alumni delivered 9 oral and 92 poster presentations, an
astounding
show of productivity from a relatively small program of which we are
all very
proud. We would like to remind you that the 7th International
Conference on AIDS in Asia will be held in Kobe, Japan, November
27-December 1,
2003 (http://www.icaap7.jp). Abstracts submission deadline is April 1.
Also, the 13th
International Conference on HIV/AIDS and Sexually Transmitted
Infections in
Africa (ICASA) will be held in Nairobi, Kenya September 21-26, 2003.
Abstracts
are due by Feb. 28.; (http://www.icasanairobi2003.org/). As in the
past, we will do our best to help you to
secure funding to attend these conferences, although our program no
longer has
the means to support you directly. But we are happy to help in whatever
way we
can!
Just recently,
we were awarded
one of 11 University Technical Assistance Project (U-TAPS) grants in
support of
the CDC’s Global AIDS Program (CDC-GAP). The mission of CDC-GAP is to
provide
resource-constrained countries help with HIV prevention, care and
treatment,
and capacity development. CAPS, along
with our partner the Institute for Global Health at UCSF, will be
conducting
surveillance training activities in Brazil and China and monitoring and
evaluation of HIV programs in Brazil, Cambodia and Thailand. This is an
exciting 5-year project for us, as it builds on the expertise our
faculty and
staff have developed through fifteen years of conducting international
HIV
prevention training and research. To learn more about CDC-GAP, you can
visit
their website (http://www.cdc.gov/nchstp/od/gap/).
Best wishes to
all of you. We invite you to keep in touch.
We will do the same.
George W.
Rutherford, MD, — Director, CAPS International
Program
Jeffrey Mandel,
PhD, MPH — Co-Director, CAPS International
Program
UCSF Prevention
Sciences Group
74 New
Montgomery, Suite 600
San Francisco,
California 94105 -3444 USA
Phone : (415)
597-9100
FAX
: (415) 597-9213, (415) 597 9125
E-mail:
JMandel@psg.ucsf.edu
We
gratefully acknowledge support from the National Institute of Mental
Health
(Grant MH42459) and the Fogarty International AIDS Training Program
Grant
D43TW00003.
