SPH Receives $107 Million To Fight AIDS

The Harvard School of Public Health (SPH) will receive $107 million over the next five years to fight HIV/AIDS in Africa.

The grant, part of President Bush’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, will go to the SPH AIDS Treatment Care and Prevention Initiative for humanitarian efforts in Botswana, Nigeria and Tanzania.

The initiative is headed by SPH Professor of Immunology and Infectious Disease Phyllis Kanki, and includes Associate Professor of Nutrition and Epidimiology Wafaie W. Fawzi and Research and Executive Director of the Harvard AIDS Institute Richard G. Marlink.

The grant to SPH is the largest of four announced on Monday in Washington D.C. by Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson, Secretary of State Colin Powell and U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator, Ambassador Randall Tobias.

Speaking from Nigeria, where she is working to commission an HIV prevention laboratory, Kanki said the grant would greatly expand the scope of the assistance she and her colleagues would be able to provide.

“It’s really wonderful,” she said. “We have programs in these countries, and we’ve been able to do research, but we’ve had our hands tied behind our back in terms of being able to provide treatments.”

University Provost Steven E. Hyman praised the team in an e-mail yesterday.

“There are few problems in the world today more urgent than the global AIDS epidemic,” he wrote.

“President Summers and I are proud that Harvard’s School of Public Health has been recognized as one of the leaders in the fight against AIDS.”

The three team members will continue to work in the countries where they have been working: Kanki in Nigeria, Marlink in Botswana and Fawzi in Tanzania. With the first-year funds of $17 million, they hope to treat 8,000, 4,000 and 3,000 people respectively.

In addition to funding HIV and AIDS treatments directly, the team members say the grant will also be used to fight opportunistic infections associated with AIDS, such as tuberculosis.

Marlink said he appreciates the goal-oriented nature of the grant. Every year, based on the team’s accomplishments, the government will readjust the size of the grant.

He said the initiative’s performance will be judged based on three numbers: how many people have been diagnosed and brought into a system of care, how many have been put on anti-retroviral therapy (ART) and how many people have been impacted by efforts at prevention.

“I’m a clinician, and [I] want to have results at the end of the day. Did you save their life? Did you help prevent a problem?” Marlink said. “What’s nice about this is that we are putting our tax dollars to work but monitoring to see that they are actually being put to good use.”

Fawzi said that the grant will allow him to provide ART to more people in Tanzania than ever before. He said such medication had been available only to the affluent through private pharmacies until now.

“It’s a unique opportunity to start providing anti-retroviral therapy,” he said. “This will be perhaps the first initiative [in Tanzania] to provide widespread anti-retroviral medication.”

Fawzi said that, though the efforts will be divided among the three countries, the researchers will still collaborate and communicate.

“I expect we will set up a mechanism to coordinate across countries,” he said. “There might be some unique issues for each country, but we will try to keep in touch and have an annual meeting to share experiences.”

The grant application process began in December, when the government and Center for Disease Control put out a call for groups that had worked to fight AIDS in at least three countries for at least three years.

The application had a Dec. 31 deadline, meaning the group had to write its application at a feverish pace.

“Except for a few hours on Christmas Day, I had no holidays,” said Marlink.

He said the tough requirements and short application period led to a good deal of self-selection among applicants.

Continuing the fast-paced process, team members say they are anxious to get to work.

“I expect we’ll get started in a matter of weeks,” said Fawzi. “It’s an exciting opportunity.”

—Staff writer Nathaniel A. Smith can be reached at nsmith@fas.harvard.edu.