Prevent Defense

Big news from the HIV prevention community! The AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition (AVAC) is very committed to this cause - as you might be able to guess from their name - but have yet to demonstrate any real success (they supported the failed microbicide trials in South Africa last year) . There are a few phase II clinical trials of HIV vaccines taking place in different parts of Sub-Saharan Africa; I imagine this money from Bill and Melinda will help to finance strategic scale-up and distribution of the drug if the studies prove to be successful. Unfortunately, the studies won't be completed until at least 2008 or 2009. Here's to hoping it all works out!

from The Lancet Blog:

US$14 million grant for HIV prevention campaign

Thursday August 23rd 2007

The AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition is launching a new organization to promote the development of a wide variety of HIV prevention strategies, including microbicides and oral preventive drugs.

The launch of the new organization, called The HIV Prevention Research Advocacy Network, was announced by AVAC Tuesdsy, Aug 21 in Seattle at the AIDS Vaccine 2007 conference.

The initiative will be funded by five-year, US$14 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

According to the press release announcing the network’s launch, the organization will:

•Develop international advocacy partnerships that support both the needs of communities involved in research and a global advocacy movement for HIV prevention research.

• Translate complex scientific ideas to communities AND translate community needs and perceptions to the scientific community.

• Work to hold both research agencies and advocates accountable for accelerating ethical prevention research and development.

• Help ensure that communities, policymakers, and civil society have realistic expectations about HIV prevention research and specific clinical trials.

• Work closely with other groups conducting HIV prevention research advocacy, including microbicide advocacy groups.

AVAC also released it annual report, which provides an overview of the state of HIV vaccine research today. Of particular interest is a section that looks at the slow uptake of both male circumcision as an HIV prevention strategy and the vaccine for human papilloma Virus (HPV). These case studies, the report argues, holds lessons for those seeking to implement other prevention strategies.

To visit AVAC site and download the new report go to: http://www.avac.org/

To visit the AIDS Vaccine 2007 conference website go to: www.hivvaccineenterprise.org/conference/index.html

By Michael McCarthy

You think you know, but you have no idea

I think I'm little burnt out after writing up my first day of the conference, along with putting together all of the materials for my first paid assignment(!). I think I should hold off on Days 2 and 3 of the SA Aids Conference for the time being. I'll likely volunteer to put together a short presentation for some people in my office (many of whom weren't able to go because of the great expense of conference passes), and I will pirate some material from that to put up here.

Oh yeah, I have those pictures that I just uploaded to Fickr. Those of you who read my feed in a RSS reader have probably already seen some of them, but I never put them up here.

These are some pictures from 3 different events last week: the Bafana Bafana soccer match, the Peace Players International City-Wide Tournament, and George's birthday. I think you should be able to figure out which pics are from which event.

Hoopz

Tomorrow I'm going to be coaching a group of 20 7th graders from Umlazi, one of the townships just outside of Durban most burdened with HIV.

There's is a giant City-Wide hoops tournament taking place - put together by the folks at this fine NGO. Nearly 1,500 kids are expected to show up. There will be some Life Skillz sessions, and the original teams that arrive together will be eventually mixed into teams comprised of kids of different races and kids from different part of Durban (urban, rural, and township areas). It should be a lot of fun, and I'll see if I can get some good pictures during the timeouts.

But tonight: we party (and dance, hopefully)! Happy June.

We are the champions

I leave my left hand up in the air as I watch the ball snap through the net. I have just put my team up by 10 points in the closing minutes of the citywide basketball final, virtually sealing the championship for my team. A small smile grows on my face, equal parts excitement and relief. The crowd is cheering surprisingly loudly, and all I can do is shrug my shoulders and backpedal down the court.

This is a childhood dream of mine – the sort that so many little boys have while shooting around in local parks/schoolyards/driveways as dusk gently settles across the sky, blurring lines between fantasy and reality. It is also, incidentally, exactly what happened on this past Saturday afternoon while playing in the eThekwini District Basketball Tournament.

On Saturday morning I got up early to help the Peace Players International (PPI) guys run another basketball clinic out in Chatsworth, as has become our weekly custom. After we finished cleaning up the balls and cones at the Chatsworth Youth Center and were back on the road back into downtown Durban, they invited me to be the fifth man on their team for a basketball tournament that they heard was being held down at the Durban Institute of Technology. Excited at the prospect of some good hoops and an interesting experience, I quickly said Yes.

Four games and three hours in the hot Durban summer sun later, the final whistle sounded, and we were crowned champions of this (annual?) tournament. And while I wasn’t entirely happy with my individual performance, we played some fantastic team basketball and had come out on top. We were each given individual medals and a big trophy for the team to share; don’t worry I have already put in my request to have the hardware at my house one day each week. It was an amazing experience – a dream-come-true in the purest sense – and one hell of an early birthday present.

You wanna see how happy I was?:



And, just because I'm sure you're wondering, my birthday was lots of fun as well.

When the going gets tough

I imagine that you can tell from my post earlier this morning that I've been struggling a bit over the past few days. It's not always easy living far away from the people, places, and things that you consider Home - but I am trying to tell myself that these are equally valuable parts of this experience.

In a last-ditch effort to increase the weekly Joy Quotient of STAB I was going to upload some of the devastatingly cute pictures of the kids I help teach basketball to on the weekends - however, the Blogger site doesn't seem to be accepting uploads at the moment, and I've maxed out all of my Flickr bandwith for the month. So, you'll just have to wait on those pix for a little while. Uhhhhh, looks I'm a big liar. The upload script seems to be working just fine now. Enjoy the pictures (I'll try to get some more good ones when I go out with the PeacePlayers International guys again next week) and have a lovely weekend!

A man about town

Hey Everyone –

Sorry about the lapse between posts. The past few days at work have been quite busy, and I didn’t have any internet at the house over the weekend – as usual. However, here are some of the exciting things I did this past weekend:

Friday night I went out to Durban’s City Hall to see a performance by the KZN Philharmonic. When I arrived at City Hall, I was struck by how ‘European’ the building looked – white stone, ornate carvings, and generally out-of-place with regards to the rest of the architecture in the city. After asking a few questions and some cursory internet search, I have solved the mystery(!); Durban’s City Hall was built in 1910 and is almost an exact replica of the city hall of Belfast, Northern Ireland. Strange, right? I haven’t been able figure out exactly how this came to be, but I’d bet that there aren’t nearly as many palm trees growing alongside their City Hall. And to top it all of, the evenings’ performance of Beethoven’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in D major was absolutely wonderful as well. Hopefully I’ll be able to make it back to hear the Philharmonic perform again before their summer season comes to an end in April.

I got up early on Saturday morning to meet up with the newly hired Program Directors at Peace Players International (formerly Playing for Peace, that NGO has had applied to work for last fall) at their flat, about 3 kms from where I’m staying. After some brief introductions and filling up my water bottle in anticipation of a 95 degree day, we all hopped in their car and set out towards Chatsworth – a large, predominantly-Indian township just outside of Durban. We ran a three hour long basic skills clinic for the 75 or so 5th and 6th graders who showed up. I was put in charge of the passing drills, and had an absolute blast working with the kids. Afterwards, we hopped back in the car and headed to the beach for a few hours of hanging out and getting to know each other. It turns out that two of the three new hires for Peace Players had studied abroad in Durban (and had worked as interns for the organization) during their junior year at school. Their knowledge of the city and of the Peace Players model was really impressive, and I hope to spend more time with them in the coming weeks. In fact, there are going to be similar clinics taking place over the next few Saturdays, so I’m sure I’ll have more stories to tell soon enough.

Saturday night I went to go see Almodovar’s new film Volver, which I highly recommend you guys go out and see. And Sunday was spent enjoying the cool weather brought about by the massive electrical/rain storm on Saturday night, doing some reading, and going for a nice long run in the afternoon.

I’m sorry for the long, expository post – I’ve started stockpiling some ideas for posts on South African music, culture, and socioeconomics, and hopefully I can finish putting together in the coming days. The most exciting new of the day, however, is the fact that tonight I AM HAVING MY FIRST BUNNY CHOW. I started extolling the virtues of the bunny long before I ever arrived in SA, but I have been very bad about actually getting around to eating one. Tonight, my friends, this will change. And hopefully I will live through the deluge of capsaicin to tell you about it.

I hope you are all doing well, and I’ll be in touch again soon.

Playing for Peace

This morning I got a rejection letter (well, it was an e-mail actually) from the only other international job I had been seriously considering. The job was with this interesting NGO that starts basketball leagues in regions with histories of ethnic and/or religious conflict - bringing children from both sides of the conflict together to play on mixed race/mixed religion teams and participate in a seemingly well-designed life skills curriculum. Coincidentally, they run a basketball league in Durban, SA and I was initially very excited about the possibility of working with them as a Program Director. However, as things came together with this public health position at the McCord Hospital in the past month, I had almost given up on the NGO job. But it's still never fun to get rejected.

I'm actually thinking about writing back to my contact at the NGO and letting him know that I'm going to be in Durban anyways. I wonder if they might let me volunteer some of my time to help them out with their programming. We discussed it briefly during my interview when I mentioned that there were some public health positions in South Africa that I was also looking into. It would be really great to see the work that they are doing, and I would love to have the opportunity to meet a group of other young Americans to hang out and hoop with. I don't have any idea what my daily schedule will be like when I get to Durban, but I can't imagine that there's any harm in asking if they might be able to use some free labor.

These first few posts have been pretty formulaic, I think. I can't tell yet if it's a good thing or a bad thing. At Amherst we have a blog-esque site called PlanWorld and I had done some writing on that, but this seems to be a different beast altogether, and I guess I'll just figure it out as I go along.

Finally, does anyone have any good digicam suggestions? I need a new camera before I leave, and I can't figure out what kind I should get; the only things that are important to me, i think, are the size of the camera (very small) and the lapse between pushing the button and the picture actually being taken (very short). My brother has a Cannon Powershot Elph and he seems to like it, but that's about all I have going for me at the moment. Thanks for information you guys can share.

Audioblogging will commence tomorrow? Saturday? Stay tuned...