On Friday September 9th, Awewura Kwara gave a Baraza presentation entitled, “Building Academic Partnership for HIV/AIDS Care and Research in Ghana.” Dr. Kwara is an Associate Professor of Medicine within the Division of Infectious Diseases and Global Medicine in the College of Medicine at UF. Dr. Kwara recently joined the UF community this year from his previous position as Associate Professor of Medicine at Brown University. The talk provided an overview of a past partnership for HIV/AIDS care and research between the University of Ghana (UG), Brown University, Tufts University, and Yale University, with hopes of garnering interest in a future UG-UF partnership in the future.
The project formally focused on testing the effectiveness of medicines in patients with both HIV and TB. Though Ghana has a relatively low HIV rate (1.3% – 1.9%), it has a comparatively high TB rate (~300 cases per 100,000) and, further, it is estimated that about 30% of individuals with TB also have a HIV infection. Since medicines for both HIV and TB interact, testing had to be done to ensure this group of patients were receiving adequate and effective treatment. This project was supported by the USAID (2011-2013), the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), and a NIH Fogarty grant. Work stemming from these partner projects has been published in a number of journals including AIDS, West African Journal of Medicine, Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, and Ghana Medical Journal.