The New York State AIDS International Training and Research (NYS AITRP) was initially funded in 1993 to focus on three countries in Central Europe, the Czech Republic (CR), Hungary and Poland. This program represents a unique merging of an academic medical center (SUNY Downstate), a school of public health (SUNY Albany) and a state department of health (New York State Department of Health). The program has provided long term training in both HIV, HIV related opportunistic infections, and STIs in laboratory and population based studies to 58 trainees and short-term training to an additional 40. Their productivity is evidenced by publication of over 200 publications and the receipt of substantial extramural funding. With rising rates of HIV secondary to IDU in Estonia, Russia, Georgia and Armenia, we proposed to continue our goal of creating and sustaining a new generation of public health leaders and academic investigators trained in population-based and biomedical interventions that can collaboratively prevent the transmission and progression of HIV in Eastern Europe. This will be accomplished by the following efforts: a. To foster collaborative, interdisciplinary in-country HIV prevention and treatment research networks among our trainees and those supported by other programs; b. To utilize academic resources in New York State as well as the AITRP network to ensure that the most productive assets are utilized for HIV training efforts; c. To build in-country HIV research capacity and productivity via a continuous mentoring process; d. To utilize existing in-country HIV training assets to take advantage of existing regional centers of excellence. Recognizing the challenges to HIV screening in blood in the region, we will continue to work with the New York Blood Center on blood safety training. Given the burden of injection drug use as relates to HIV transmission, we will also utilize the National Development and Research Institutes as a training partner. Building on a growing infrastructure of NIH and other funding in country, we will provide training for 7 candidates for the MS degree in epidemiology, 5 post-docs in laboratory science, 5 medium term ?certificates? in epidemiology, 5 trainees in blood safety, and 5 internships at NDRI in interventions focused on HIV prevention in drug users. In addition, we will initiate a short-term training course in the Caucasus, focused on modern analytical epidemiological methods related to HIV disease in conjunction with the Emory University AITRP. ?
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