By Mina Hosseinipour, MD, MPH Officials announced the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in Malawi on April 2, 2020. At UNC Project Malawi, we’d been working for a month to carefully review and prepare for the virus. We established COVID preventive procedures and clinical management guidelines and planning for staff and staff relatives. We … Continued

Projects include vaccinating farmworkers arriving in North Carolina, managing data from Nicaragua, and testing blood samples from Africa   UNC’s Office of Global Health Education (OGHE) is awarding $23,000 to teams of global health faculty and medical students to pursue COVID-19 related research and service learning in the spring or summer of 2021. During a … Continued

“Mina sees beyond what I see. She gives me the ‘aha moment,’ and I always ask myself how did I not see that. I keep aiming to do more and be the best in what I do because of her,” Mitch Matoga, MD, PhD, a senior researcher with UNC Project-Malawi, says of his fellowship mentor, … Continued

  Eli Lilly today released results of a clinical trial that found bamlanivimab, a monoclonal antibody, significantly reduced the risk of contracting COVID-19 among residents and staff of long-term care facilities. The Phase 3 trial was conducted in partnership with the NIH”s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the COVID-19 Prevention Network (CoVPN). … Continued

In the summer of 2001, Shani Morgan was a few months pregnant and in prison, where she learned that she had HIV. She’d been sent from jail to Bragg Street Women’s Prison in Raleigh for better monitoring and medical treatment. What she remembers most about being treated by her UNC doctor, Becky White, MD, MPH, … Continued

U.S. News & World Report has ranked the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill 11th among universities globally for its infectious diseases program. The Best Global Universities rankings, now in their seventh year, focus on academic research, publications and citations, international collaboration, and overall reputation. This is the first time infectious diseases programs have been included … Continued

A collaborative team, drawing in part on experience working with disease outbreaks in Africa, has remarkably transformed UNC’s Medical Intensive Care Unit to treat COVID-19 patients. They’ve demonstrated that it’s possible to provide critical care for patients while keeping providers safe. Like most of us during the pandemic, Billy Fischer, MD, has stayed put the … Continued

UNC Global Women’s Health has received two new grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for work on pregnancy outcomes in Zambia. The first grant funds the “Multi-omics for Mother and Infants (MOMI) Consortium,” which seeks to identify new predictive biomarkers for preterm birth, preeclampsia, stillbirth and fetal growth restriction. UNC Project-Zambia is one … Continued

The Infectious Diseases Society of America, the nation’s leading infectious diseases professional society, has elected the Institute’s Joseph Eron, MD; Anne Lachiewicz, MD, MPH; and Christopher Hurt, MD, to its latest cohort of Fellows of IDSA. As the highest honor in the field of infectious diseases, IDSA fellowships recognize those who have achieved professional excellence … Continued

AIDS Clinical Trials Group, co-led by UNC’s Joseph Eron, MD, also re-funded for seven years Myron S. Cohen, MD, director of UNC’s Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases, and Wafaa El-Sadr, MD, MPH, MPA, director of ICAP at Columbia University, have received a seven-year award from the National Institutes of Health for leadership of … Continued

  The National Institutes of Health has awarded University of North Carolina’s Institute for Global Health & Infectious Diseases nearly $25 million over seven years to continue operating its Global HIV Clinical Trials Unit, or CTU. The new funding will support HIV treatment and prevention in adults, children and pregnant women at four research sites … Continued

  A team of investigators from UNC’s Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases has been awarded $1.5 million from the National Institutes of Health to conduct a two-year implementation science study to scale up COVID-19 testing in North Carolina. The researchers will examine the impact of a COVID screening program that uses approaches adapted … Continued

ACTG names second new award for former UNC neurology professor, Kevin Robertson The national AIDS Clinical Trials Group expanded its annual recognition program in 2020 with two new awards named for University of North Carolina faculty members who died in 2019: Charles van der Horst, MD, an infectious diseases physician and researcher, and Kevin Robertson, … Continued

The year was 1993. Alexis Mwanza, then 17, found himself huddled on top of a train, fleeing violence in his home town in the Democratic Republic of Congo by leading nine of his family members 500 miles away to Mbuji Mayi. As a displaced refugee in that city, Mwanza watched Red Cross workers and other … Continued

Research looks at leveraging diagnostic technology to improve management of pediatric infections in low-resource settings Emily Ciccone, MD, MHS, a UNC clinical instructor and infectious diseases fellow, recently won first prize in the clinical research award session of the 2020 annual meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. The award recognizes excellence … Continued

  Last week’s authorization by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for emergency use of bamlanivimab feels like a shot in the arm, so to speak, for David Wohl, MD, a UNC infectious diseases physician and researcher. A monoclonal antibody developed by Eli Lilly to treat mild to moderate COVID-19, bamlanivimab is one of the … Continued

Study led by female investigators enrolled women living with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa A long-acting injectable drug, cabotegravir, is safe and more effective than a daily pill in preventing HIV acquisition, according to results from a study of 3,127 cisgender women in sub-Saharan Africa. Led by UNC researchers beginning in November 2017, the study showed … Continued

Six students from Dzama, Malawi — three girls and three boys — have received scholarships to attend private school and receive individual tutoring as the inaugural class of “Charlie Scholars.” The Charlie van der Horst Malawi Scholars Program, administered by UNC Project-Malawi and the UNC Medical Foundation, honors the late UNC infectious diseases physician who … Continued

The HIV Medicine Association, or HIVMA, has honored UNC infectious diseases professor Ada Adimora, MD, MPH, with its 2020 Clinical Educator Award. The award, presented during the annual IDWeek conference, recognizes Adimora’s “extraordinary contributions to advancing clinical education, with a focus on disseminating her research on the drivers of HIV-related racial disparities.” Adimora is the … Continued

Human beings will continue to suffer from infectious diseases, some of them contagious. To fight a new disease, infectious disease physicians first work to determine the rules that govern the disease, its spread, and the gravity of the infection. Those rules then determine our prevention and treatment strategies, Institute Director Myron Cohen, MD, told his … Continued