Routine HIV data are key to understanding the HIV epidemic and the impact of prevention and treatment interventions.
The unique contribution of MeSH is to:
Our activities are driven by three core questions:
How best to characterise locations, populations and individuals at greatest HIV risk through better harnessing of data from HIV prevention programmes?
How to measure / estimate HIV incidence through harnessing data from routine HIV testing platforms?
How best to understand onward HIV transmission risk through better analysis of individual-level, de-duplicated data among all people living with HIV?
The consortium consists of four research groups based at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), University of North Carolina (UNC) Project Malawi in Lilongwe, the Centre for Sexual Health and HIV/AIDS Research Zimbabwe (CeSHHAR) in Harare, and the Centre for Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Research (CIDER) at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.
It's time, it seems, to meet the teams.
CeSHHAR takes forward a range of HIV prevention and care activities in partnership with the Ministry of Health and Child Care. MeSH has been working in partnership with CeSHHAR since 2015 and has helped strengthen care cascade analysis, develop prevention cascade frameworks among female sex workers, and attain national sex worker size estimates.
CIDER, a MeSH collaborative partner since 2015, combines infectious disease epidemiology, implementation science in routine information systems, HIV cohort management and analysis, and infectious disease modelling, all strongly linked to service delivery and improvement. The group are a WHO collaborating centre for HIV epidemiology and research and are responsible for the national care and treatment software for South Africa.
UNC Project-Malawi has been running since 1999 as a centre of excellence for HIV/STD research, care and capacity building. This group has worked with the Malawi Ministry of Health in designing programs to control the spread of HIV and STIs, developing and testing country-specific STI guidelines, and facilitating care in STI clinics. UNC Project-Malawi now provides free HIV testing and counselling to outpatients at Bwaila STI clinic, with a focus on identifying acute infection, and partners with the Lighthouse HIV outpatient clinic and Kamuzu Central Hospital inpatient facilities.
Professor James Hargreaves is Director of the MeSH consortium. He is a Professor in Epidemiology and Evaluation with a focus in social epidemiology and public health evaluation.
Brian Rice is an Associate Professor at LSHTM and Deputy Director of the MeSH consortium. For the best part of the past twenty years, Brian has worked in the field of HIV surveillance epidemiology . . .
Kathie Granger is the Project Manager for the MeSH consortium. She has 20 years’ experience in marketing and finance and has worked within HIV and sexual health as project manager for the past 10.
Sarah Bourdin leads the knowledge translation and dissemination activities for the MeSH Consortium while also contributing to several research projects within the group.
Lucy Platt is a Professor of Public Health Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and a co-investigator on the MeSH Consortium.
Tom Hartney is a Research Fellow and data lead for the MeSH Consortium. He has research interests in improving HIV surveillance systems...
Frances is clinical epidemiologist and Professor of Global Health at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and Director of the Centre for Sexual Health and HIV/AIDS Research (CeSHHAR) Zimbabwe. She leads a portfolio of HIV implementation research in Zimbabwe including with sex workers.
Dr Fortunate Machingura currently serves as the Research Director - Key Populations at the Center for Sexual Health and HIV AIDS Research (CeSHHAR Zimbabwe).
Galven Maringwa is a Research Statistician at the Centre for Sexual Health, HIV & AIDS Research (CeSHHAR). He holds a Master of Science in Statistics specializing in Biostatistics . . .
Professor Andrew Boulle is a Public Health Medicine specialist with the Western Cape Provincial Department of Health and Professor of Public Health Medicine at the University of Cape Town.
Dr Nisha Jacob is a Public Health physician and senior lecturer in the School of Public Health and Family Medicine at the University of Cape Town.
Dr. Hosseinipour is the Scientific Director of the UNC Project in Lilongwe Malawi and Professor of Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine.
Emmanuel Singogo is the Program Manager/Analyst for MeSH/University of North Carolina (UNC) Project in Malawi. The MeSH/UNC-Malawi partnership is currently working to support . . .
Sharon focuses on research to identify and characterize local sexual and injecting drug use networks in resource poor settings among the most vulnerable populations . . .
James' primary interest has been in the socioeconomic epidemiology of HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis in sub-Saharan Africa and in developing and evaluating interventions to address these public health issues.
Brian Rice is an Associate Professor at LSHTM and Deputy Director of the MeSH consortium. For the best part of the past twenty years, Brian has worked in the field of HIV surveillance epidemiology, and has published on HIV related research conducted in the UK, Europe, and Southern Africa.
Kathie is responsible for the strategic management, administration and financial control of all budgets held by the project and its staff. She is primary point of contact at LSHTM for collaborating institutions and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Tom Hartney is a Research Fellow and data lead for the MeSH Consortium. He has research interests in improving HIV surveillance systems, sexual health promotion and making use of routinely collected healthcare data.
Sarah’s interests lie within sexual and reproductive health freedom, strengthening HIV surveillance and improving the targeting of key populations.
CeSHHAR runs the nationally scaled Sisters with a Voice Programme in Zimbabwe on behalf of Ministry of Health and Child Care and National AIDS Council. Frances is research lead for MeSH in Zimbabwe.
Dr Fortunate Machingura currently serves as the Research Director - Key Populations at the Center for Sexual Health and HIV AIDS Research (CeSHHAR Zimbabwe). She is a Co-PI in multiple HIV prevention projects in Southern Africa including MESH.
. . . from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KULeuven), Belgium. His interests are dealing with data and helping to find practical solutions to problems in the area of HIV and AIDS.
Andrew's research has predominantly addressed operational and clinical questions related to HIV service provision, often through analyses of HIV cohorts or population-based analyses.
Nisha's research is based at the Centre for Infectious Diseases Epidemiology and Research (CIDER) and centres around evaluating programmatic, child and maternal health outcomes of antiretroviral use in pregnancy, as well strengthening health surveillance in the Western Cape province using routine data sources.
As a Senior Researcher on the MeSH project, Meg continues to work on completing a PhD considering the impact of policies on morbidity and mortality within the HIV services. Her interests lie in improving health information ecosystems and using the resulting population-level data to improve patient management and service delivery.
Trained in internal medicine, infectious diseases and epidemiology, she has been engaged in HIV Treatment and Prevention clinical trials since 2001 and has more recently focused on integration of services in HIV care, including depression management. She also directs several research capacity building programs in Malawi, primarily focused on implementation science.
. . . the smooth implementation of the Blantyre Prevention Strategy together with Georgetown University, Copper/Smith, Ministry of Health and the National AIDS Commission and others to improve the measurement and surveillance of HIV/AIDs to inform HIV prevention and treatment programs in Malawi.
Lucy is an epidemiologist who applies different quantitative techniques to estimate population sizes to measure the health status of key populations and evaluate social policies and complex interventions.
. . . and subsequently to translate those findings into strategies to improve health and prevent the spread of HIV. Her work with the MeSH Consortium includes incorporating recency testing into PLACE methodology.
. . . a health information exchange that integrates data from routine electronic health information sources. Her role on MeSH is to support developments at the WCPHDC that are required for MeSH analyses.