UIC SPH Assistant Professor Receives $10,000 To Study STD Prevention In KenyaSupriya Mehta, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health, was recently awarded a $10,000 grant from the University of Illinois School of Public Health seed funding program. The money will be used to examine the prevalence and types of drug resistant Neisseria Gonorrhoeae (NG), the bacteria responsible for gonorrhea, in men and women participating in the Universities of Nairobi, Illinois and Manitoba Project STD Clinic in Kisumu, Kenya.
Mehta, in collaboration with co-investigator and UIC SPH epidemiologist, Robert Bailey, will also look at the correlation between the occurrence of these drug resistant strands and the patient’s previous clinical visits, the individual’s history of infection, and the ways in which he was treated.
With this grant, Mehta said she hopes to determine whether drug resistant strains of NG have any effect on the type of treatment used to cure infected individuals. If found that this is the case, the information collected may prove to help guide research into forms of alternative antibiotic therapies and insure patients are treated with antibiotics that provide the greatest chance of curing their affliction. Mehta has also proposed that through this study, preliminary data will be collected with the potential to aid an effort which could expand the research into a larger, international study.
This latest excursion to Kenya will not be Mehta’s first. She has published several previous studies related to STD surveillance and prevention. In 2007, alongside Bailey, she published a study on the occurrence of infection of a herpes virus among young uncircumcised men in the Kenyan region, and another on the identification of novel risks for non-ulcerative sexually transmitted infections among young men in Kenya.
-- Karen Schmidt
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