Although the seroprevalence of HIV has declined in Uganda over the past 10 years, the HIV epidemic in Uganda is far from controlled. In the face of the HIV epidemic, tuberculosis rates are high and associated with significant mortality. With the advent of antiretroviral therapy, prevention strategies alone are no longer sufficient to meet the current needs in Uganda. There is now a moral imperative to bring the remarkable advances in the field of HIV to developing countries like Uganda. One key step in the rebuilding of the Ugandan public health infrastructure resulted from a unique collaboration between the Ugandan Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Defense and Makerere University to form the Joint Clinical Research Center (JCRC). The JCRC is a research and health care facility devoted entirely to HIV and leads the way in opening Africa to antiretroviral therapy. Through the years, the JCRC has formed strong collaborations with Case Western Reserve University, the National Tuberculosis and Leprosy Control Programme, and Mbarara University. The proposed training program will build on these strong relationships with the common mission of controlling HIV and TB. The goal of this proposal is to develop a comprehensive training program that will build the Ugandan capacity to translate basic and clinical research findings into public health policy and interventions. The training program will build on a growing number of clinical research projects on HI I and TB and extend the findings of these studies to the public health and policy arena.
The specific aims of this application are to form a planning committee, create an institutional develop plan, define research and training agendas, and develop plans for program evaluation. This strategy will be developed through a year long series of planning exercises between the investigators at the Joint Clinical Research Center in Kampala, Uganda, Case Western Reserve University, in the US, Mbarara University of Sciences and Technology, National Tuberculosis and Leprosy Control Programme, and Kampala City Council.
