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Exploring Barriers and Facilitators to Blood Donation in Secondary Schools in Malawi

May 23, 2025
Despite the Malawi Blood Transfusion Service (MBTS) increasing the amount of blood collected since its inception in 2004, Malawi remains with a 27% deficit in required blood supplies nationally. Mina Hosseinipour, MD, MPH, and researchers sought to understand the facilitators and barriers to blood donation among secondary school students in...

Effectiveness of Levonorgestrel Implant and Depot Medroxyprogesterone Acetate Injectable for Women living with HIV on Efavirenz

May 19, 2025
A collaborative study that included the Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases, UNC Project-Malawi, and the UNC Center For AIDS Research (CFAR), compared the contraceptive effectiveness of a typical-use LNG implant and depot medroxyprogesterone acetate (DMPA) injectable during efavirenz use. The study included women living with HIV (WLHIV) on...

Public Health Expert Studies Disease, Empowers Next Generation of Researchers

May 7, 2025
Dr. Mina Hosseinipour’s interest in infectious diseases and medicine began when she was a medical resident in Houston, Texas. Many patients were immigrants, and she was treating several for HIV using a new combination of anti-HIV drugs commonly known as HAART. “It made me want to understand why certain diseases...

NICHD Grant Award Enables Researchers To Address Reasons For Vertical Transmission of HIV in Malawi As the Country Pursues Elimination Goals: Integrated Educational Cores Represent the Best of Capacity Building with Malawian Health Leaders

August 15, 2023
Led by Mina Hosseinipour, MD, MPH, the NIH’s National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), has funded the project “Preventing Infant Infections with Implementation Science in Malawi.” (PRI3SM). The program, in partnership with the Republic of Malawi’s Ministry of Health, comprises three studies to address gaps in prevention services,...

Some of the Many Faces of HIV Research: Treatment, Prevention and Pursuing a Cure

December 13, 2022
HIV virus eradication is a complex health challenge due to its long-lived persistence and how it hides in latently infected cells that escape the body’s immune system. Effective HIV treatments have decreased the likelihood of someone developing AIDS, while helping individuals live long and healthy lives without transmission to sexual...

IGHID Investigators Discuss Projects As New Academic Year Begins

August 12, 2022
Global health research is a collaborative process, and each researcher at the Institute for Global Health & Infectious Diseases contributes a piece to solving the puzzle of disease and morbidity. With a new academic year underway, read what some of our investigators are working on to improve the health of global populations....

Driven to make big change: spotlighting IGHID’s Global HIV Prevention and Treatment Clinical Trials Unit (CTU)

June 15, 2022
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...

Study shows long lasting cabotegravir for the prevention of HIV-1 in women superior to oral treatment

June 7, 2022
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...

Report from Malawi: Weathering a second wave—or tsunami—of COVID-19

February 10, 2021
  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...

‘What global health can accomplish’: UNC honors Hosseinipour’s dedication to mentoring with Distinguished Teaching Award

February 1, 2021
“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,...

NIH awards $25 million to UNC’s Global HIV Clinical Trials Unit

November 30, 2020
  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...

‘Major advance’: Long-acting injectable more effective than daily pill in preventing HIV

November 10, 2020
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...

UNC-led consortium to study HIV-related cancers in sub-Saharan Africa

August 24, 2020
A team of UNC researchers are partnering with colleagues at four institutions in Africa to study HIV-associated malignancies. With a five-year, $6 million grant from the NIH’s National Cancer Institute, the research consortium will look at screening and diagnosing innovations for three cancers common to people with HIV: Kaposi sarcoma,...

‘A global effort’: Report from Malawi

April 7, 2020
Irving Hoffman, international director of the Institute’s UNC Project-Malawi, offers this report as the country recorded its first death from COVID-19. As of April 8, 2020, despite limited testing, Malawi has recorded 10 COVID-19 cases with one death and some evidence of community spread. UNC Project-Malawi is taking a leading...

Researchers at UNC Project-Malawi publish record number of journal articles

January 29, 2019
Researchers at UNC Project-Malawi published 124 articles in scientific journals in 2018, setting a record for UNC Institute for Global Health’s global sites.  Twenty-six of the manuscripts featured Malawian first authors. “Our unit celebrates every publication manuscript coming from UNC Project-Malawi, especially those featuring a Malawian first author,” says Maga...