Infectious disease research at the UNC Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases (IGHID) attracts unique people driven to make big change in the world. As HIV/AIDS turned 40 in 2021, the world was immersed in a different pandemic, one that brought reminders of the tremendous change science made possible in understanding, treating and preventing … Read more

The 2022 HPTN Annual Meeting took place June 5-8 in Washington, D.C., bringing hundreds of worldwide researchers, collaborators, community representatives, and government health officials together to share updates and accomplishments and re-engage with each other as a community. HPTN Principal Investigators Myron Cohen, MD, director of the UNC Institute for Global Health & Infectious Diseases … Read more

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has awarded the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health a $65 million grant establishing an Antiviral Drug Discovery (AViDD) Center to develop oral antivirals that can combat pandemic-level viruses like COVID-19. The center builds upon and is … Read more

Intimate partner violence events may either impede or motivate PrEP adherence among African adolescent girls and young women, with age appearing to be an important consideration for IPV-related adherence interventions, according to IGHID researchers Lisa Hightow-Weidman, MD, MPH, professor of infectious diseases and principal investigator for the UNC Behavioral and Technology Lab, and Audrey Pettifor, … Read more

In 2021, women and girls in sub-Saharan Africa accounted for three of five new HIV infections, and young women aged 15–24 years were three times as likely as young men in the same age group to be infected with HIV. Despite expanded access to oral PrEP, women are disproportionately affected by HIV experiencing considerable barriers … Read more

Amy Loftis takes charge and takes care The Carolina Together Testing Program team got a lab up and running in an astonishing 11 weeks, making it possible for students to return to campus during the pandemic, before vaccines were widely available. For their heroic efforts in setting up and operating the COVID Surveillance Lab, Amy Loftis, … Read more

Tick-borne diseases (TBD) including Spotted Fever Group Rickettsiosis (SFGR), ehrlichiosis, and increasingly Lyme disease, represent a substantial public health concern throughout much of the Southeastern United States. North Carolina experiences some of the highest rates of SFGR and ehrlichiosis in the United States, often accounting for more than of 10% and 5% of cases reported to the … Read more

The UJMT Fogarty Global Health Fellows Consortium (UJMT)–a partnership between UNC-Chapel Hill, Johns Hopkins University, Morehouse School of Medicine and Tulane University–has been renewed for the coming five years. It is one of seven groups to be funded under the new Launching Future Leaders in Global Health (LAUNCH) training initiative, supported by the Fogarty International … Read more

Joseph Tucker, MD, PhD, MA, a member of the UNC Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases and associate professor in the division of infectious diseases, encourages HIV testing through his work in the US, China and South Africa. He also promotes youth-friendly HIV prevention and self-testing services. In early April, Dr. Tucker participated in … Read more

Visiting scholars make important contributions to the UNC community enriching the research and educational experience for everyone. On April 13, the UNC Institute for Global Health & Infectious Diseases (IGHID) and Carolina Asia Center (CAC) hosted scholars from the Southern Medical University in Guangzhou, China, and the Hanoi Medical University in Hanoi, Vietnam. “The Global Health … Read more

During April, STD Awareness provides an opportunity to talk about STIs and encourage individuals to be proactive about their sexual health and promotes regular STI/HIV screening and testing. Although research in sexually transmitted infections (STIs) has evolved rapidly on multiple fronts, a critical remaining challenge is the development of safe and effective vaccines for diseases that pose … Read more

Establishing accurate gestational age with ultrasound early in pregnancy is essential to delivering high-quality care.Yet, the high cost for equipment and the need for trained sonographers limits its use in low-resource settings. A new study published in NEJM Evidence introduces a novel opportunity to democratize obstetric ultrasound. UNC investigators from the Institute for Global Health … Read more

Michael Sciaudone, MD, an infectious diseases specialist at UNC, has won a 2021 postdoctoral fellowship in tropical infectious diseases from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund-American Society of Tropical Medicine & Hygiene (ASTMH). Three of the coveted fellowships are awarded nationally each year, funding research focused on low and low-middle income countries. Sciaudone will use the two-year … Read more

  A five-year training grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Cancer Institute expands the capacity of UNC’s Institute for Global Health & Infectious Diseases and Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center to train the next generation of cancer researchers in Malawi, Africa. The Malawi Cancer Outcomes Research Program, or M-CORP, includes funding for advanced degree … Read more

The NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has awarded UNC’s Marcia Hobbs and Alex Duncan a five-year, $3.9 million grant to study how a vaccine recently developed to prevent life-threatening infections caused by group B Neisseria meningitidis, the MenB vaccine, may also protect people from infection with Neisseria gonorrhoeae, a sexually transmitted bacterial … Read more

Hepatitis B virus (HBV) remains endemic throughout sub-Saharan Africa despite the widespread availability of effective childhood vaccines. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, HBV treatment and birth-dose vaccination programs are not established. UNC School of Medicine researchers led a study to evaluate the feasibility and acceptability of HBV testing and treatment of pregnant women, … Read more

The National Institutes of Health has awarded approximately $53 million in annual funding over the next five years to 10 research organizations in a continued effort to find a cure for HIV. The new awards for the Martin Delaney Collaboratories for HIV Cure Research program, initiated in 2011, further expand the initiative’s 2016 renewal from six institutions to … Read more

The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation has awarded Ross Boyce, MD, MSc, a 2021 Clinical Scientist Development Award for his research proposal entitled, “Getting malaria off the back of women and children in western Uganda,” which aims at reducing the incidence of malaria among infants and young children in rural Uganda. Boyce, an assistant professor in … Read more

UNC’s Institute of Global Health and Infectious Diseases Director Myron Cohen, MD, is the lead investigator of a study recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that shows bamlanivimab monotherapy reduced the incidence of infection in skilled nursing homes and assisted living facilities with high risk of SARS-CoV-2 exposure. The randomized phase 3 clinical trial … Read more

HIV-related mortality has decreased since 1996 due to improved treatments and evolving care guidelines, but the extent to which persons entering HIV care have a higher risk for death over the following years, compared with peers in the general population, has been unclear. Joseph Eron, MD, the Herman and Louise Smith Distinguished Professor of Medicine … Read more