The University of Washington received a $250,000 grant this week to continue a project that allows pregnant women in remote Africa to access health care through text message.

David Townes, UW associate professor of medicine (emergency medicine), joined the UW faculty in 2001. He is also a public health and medical technical advisor to the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance at USAID and a medical epidemiologist in the Emergency Response and Recovery Branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Throughout his career Townes has worked in Antarctica, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guatemala, Haiti, Indonesia, Jordan, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Nepal, Russia, Senegal, Tanzania, Turkey, the West Indies and Zambia.

Associate Professor of Global Health and Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences,  Deepa Rao, will speak at the White House during a special two-day meeting on HIV stigma, March 3-4. She was invited by the Office of National AIDS Policy, in collaboration with the NIH Office of AIDS Research, National Institute of Mental Health.

By Lisa Rossi

Two large clinical trials have found that a microbicide prevention method can safely help reduce new HIV infections in women.

Results of the ASPIRE trial, which enrolled more than 2,600 women in Africa, were announced today at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Boston. The results also will be published online in the New England Journal of Medicine.