The Indiana University School of Medicine received a grant Monday to study HIV patients’ access to testing and treatment in Austin, Indiana, where an outbreak of HIV cases occurred this year.
The two-year, $200,000 grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse will be supplemented by funding from the IU School of Medicine.
Partnering with the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, IU School of Medicine will implement a program called Treatment as Prevention®, a program developed by BC-CfE.
“The current outbreak in this rural setting in Indiana is a potential canary in the coal mine, if you will,” says Diane Janowicz, Assistant Professor of Clinical Medicine in IU School of Medicine, Division of Infectious Diseases. “Such an outbreak may occur again given the epidemic of injection drug use that we’re seeing across our country.”
The research is designed to implement strategies and technologies previously shown to be successful in British Columbia and will investigate, track, and curb the spread of HIV in Indiana.
Janowicz says they hope to use the knowledge they gain from this assessment when HIV outbreaks occur elsewhere in the United States.
