Recent news
March 2011
NIH leaders discuss new opportunities for global health research in Africa
March 15, 2011 -- As part of an interview series on “Science Speaks,” two leaders at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) spoke about a program called the Medical Education Partnership Initiative (MEPI), which aims to support medical and research education in sub-Saharan Africa. MEPI is run by the NIH’s Fogarty International Center, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, and the Health Resources and Services Administration.
NIH Director Francis Collins and Michael Johnson, deputy director of the Fogarty Center, recently visited South Africa, during which they attended a MEPI meeting that drew a large group African researchers and medical educators. Collins also attended a conference of the African and Southern African Association of Human Genetics in Cape Town, and visited a clinical trial site for microbicides for women.
It was “history to have all these medical education leaders in the room” at the MEPI meeting, Collins said, adding, “They represented 30 different African institutions, and they made it clear they had never been together. They were talking about building capacity for the training of researchers and medical educators. The sense of electricity in the room was phenomenal. That portrays a real opportunity across the continent that hadn’t been there before. Many had relationships with academic counterparts in the US or UK, but they didn’t have relationships with each other.”
Johnson said that it is “very important to support African clinicians and researchers directly because they are closest to the problems and they see the problems on the frontlines. If a patient is not responding to a treatment for HIV or TB, they are going to be the first to recognize and be able to study the cause of the problem.” He added that under MEPI, the “grant recipients (Principal Investigators, PIs) are African doctors. The PIs are no longer Americans—that is quite a shift. The African PIs are in the driver’s seat. The project also brings these African medical education leaders together to learn from each other and share ways to train doctors and conduct research in ways that directly respond to local health needs. We believe this will be very powerful.” See the links below for more information.
