NIGERIAN medical doctor, Tongdiyen Laura Jasper has been listed among the three successful applicants for grant into research work on HIV, by the International AIDS Society initiative, Collaborative Initiative for Pediatric HIV Education and Research (CIPHER). The international AIDS society is one of the biggest AIDS coordinating bodies globally.

Dr. Jasper, a public health physician, who is a graduate of medicine, University of Jos was among the 150 shortlisted from about a thousand entries and the only African who made the final four shortlisted for the grant.

he has two years to come up with a structured programme of attending to children living with HIV in the country.

The research work aims at exploring facilitators and barriers to ART adherence among young children to develop a caregiver peer mentor training curriculum and intervention programme and to also test the impact of caregiver peer support, a locally adopted behavioural intervention, to improve adherence and promote achievement of viral suppression among children.

Currently, Nigeria has the second highest number of children living with the virus behind South Africa. Nigeria with 1.9 million people living with HIV/AIDS, while 0.2 per cent are children between age 0-14 years.

Besides, the country accounted for 37, 000 of the world’s 160,000 new cases of babies born with HIV in 2016. While, South Africathe hardest-hit country in the world, with 7.1 million people living with the virushad only 12,000 newly infected children in 2016.

Hence, the work of Jasper, mother of four is to see how the viral load of these children can be suppressed with appropriate structured programme that will ensure that children do not miss any of their drug routines.

Jasper who has been working in the HIV programme in the Institute of Human Virology Nigeria for about three years now said the project starts in October 2019.

The choice of project according to her is borne out of the fact that children on HIV treatment don’t achieve viral load suppression when compared to their counterpart from Africa.

Hence, it is the curiosity to know what could be responsible for this and how best to help the children achieve viral load suppression that motivated her to go into the project.

“The aim is to discuss HIV pediatric matters and to help people come up with evidence for action to be taken into consideration for children living with HIV/AIDS,” she said.



Source; https://maniagist.com/2019/08/04/nigerian-doctor-gets-international-grant-on-hiv-aids-project/