Intervention & research projects
Intervention projects designed to prevent the transmission of HIV among prostitutes and other high-risk groups have been carried out in the Central African Republic, Ghana and Togo, funded by the Canadian International Development Agency and United States Agency for International Development. A large part of these efforts has been devoted to managing sexually transmitted infections (ITS), which are cofactors facilitating the transmission of HIV.
Other clinical and epidemiological research projects have been conducted in various countries:
- On African human trypanosomiasis: Democratic Republic of Congo, Congo-Brazzaville, Ivory Coast, Uganda;
- On HIV and STIs: Ghana, Togo, Central African Republic, Burkina Faso, Mali, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Benin, Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, Comoros;
- On acute respiratory infections: Central African Republic;
- On hepatitis C: Guinea-Bissau, Central African Republic.
Senior residents in the microbiology and infectiology program, as well as in internal medicine, pediatrics and community health, have participated in many of these projects, usually through 3-month overseas internships recognized by the Collège des Médecins du Québec, and have co-authored the resulting publications.
A project on the role of tropical disease control programs in the transmission of the hepatitis C virus (HCV) is underway in southern Cameroon with the collaboration of Dr. Richard Njouom of the Pasteur Centre in Cameroon and a senior resident in the program. We are also completing a project on the transmission of HCV and HTLV-1 in a rural area of the Central African Republic, the largest centre of trypanosomiasis in colonial Africa. Phylogenetic studies on HCV are being conducted in Guinea-Bissau and the Central African Republic. These projects are part of a general effort to understand the factors involved in the emergence of HIV in Central Africa in the first half of the 20th century, with two grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.
