IGHID News

NIH Fogarty scholar returns from a year in Durban

Rising fourth year UNC medical student Nancy L. Hancock, MPH, spent a year in South Africa conducing clinical research on HIV. She reports on her experience below:

Lions, rhinos and acute HIV, oh my!  I experienced all of these during a ten-month clinical research experience in Durban, South Africa, as part of the NIH/Fogarty International Clinical Research Scholars Program (NIH/FICRS). The NIH/FICRS program is an opportunity to experience mentored research training at NIH-funded research centers in developing countries; sites are located in Africa, Asia and the Americas.

My research was conducted at the Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa (CAPRISA) in Durban. The majority of my time was spent serving as study coordinator for an unlinked anonymous HIV seroprevalence study among pregnant women at seven rural clinics in western KwaZulu Natal. From protocol development to data analyses and report writing, this survey was my responsibility. It was incredibly rewarding to follow a project from start to finish.

My research generated a second project in which I examined the ethics of antenatal HIV surveillance, comparing biomedical ethics with public health ethics and questioning whether HIV testing should be mandatory in high prevalence settings.

Yet another project involved analyzing previously collected cohort data to determine if adolescent females participate in HIV-related studies to the same extent as older females. In addition to these formal projects, simply being at CAPRISA afforded many opportunities for tangential learning about all aspects of clinical research.

Durban is a great place to live, a unique blend of African, Afrikaans, British and Indian culture, and KwaZulu Natal offers some of the best wildlife and outdoor activity on the continent.  It was a tremendously rewarding experience, professionally and personally, and I look forward to applying my new knowledge and skills on future research projects.

For more on the NIH/FICRS program, visit http://www.fogartyscholars.org.
Information on CAPRISA is available on their website, http://www.caprisa.org.