Researchers at the Yale School of Public Health are teaming up with colleagues at the University of Puerto Rico to improve access to testing, treatment and care for people living with HIV in the capital city, San Juan.
With support from the National Institutes of Health, the Yale Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS (CIRA) and the University of Puerto Rico Medical Sciences Campus (UPR-MSC) are launching two projects designed to address Puerto Rico’s urgent HIV problem as part of the federal government’s Ending the HIV Epidemic initiative. The new grants are supported by an NIH program that aims to facilitate HIV implementation research in high-burden areas in the United States.
In the first project, a collaborative research team will work with men and women with HIV in San Juan to assess the feasibility of providing rapid oral fluid HIV self-test kits to partners of people living with HIV and to identify ways of overcoming existing barriers to treatment. Through focus groups and meetings, the team will also assess the feasibility of initiating Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis for HIV-negative partners.
“We are very excited about the ways in which these supplements will allow us to build a collaborative relationship with our partners at the University of Puerto Rico, while addressing some of the “Pillars” (Diagnose, Treat, Protect, and Respond) of the Ending the Epidemic initiative,” said Paul Cleary, the Anna M.R. Lauder Professor of Public Health, director of CIRA, and Yale’s principal investigator on the self-testing study.
The project is supported by a $172,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).