Malaysian Wins IAS/NIDA Scholarship to Research HIV on MSM

KUALA LUMPUR, July 3 (Bernama) -- Researcher Howie Lim Sin How has become the first Malaysian to win the distinguished International Aids Society/National Institute on Drug Abuse (IAS/NIDA) fellowship programme for 2013. Lim, 36, is one of four recipients worldwide to receive the prestigious award. The other three are an Ugandan and two Vietnamese. The scholarship, worth RM255,000 (US$75,000), will allow Lim to undergo an 18-month research programme at Yale University, United States. He will focus his research, among others, on HIV infection on men who have sex with men (MSM) in Malaysia as well as via substances and drug use. "Currently, there's no research done on this issue in Malaysia. But there is a need for an extensive research on this sector because HIV prevalence among MSM is high at 12 per cent compared to 10 per cent a few years back," Lim told Bernama on the sidelines of the 7th International Aids Society (IAS) Conference on HIV Pathogenesis, Prevention and Treatment here Tuesday. Lim is currently attached to the Centre of Excellence for Research in Aids, University of Malaya. Meanwhile, Malaysia's success in reducing HIV vulnerability among injecting drug users through its harm reduction strategy has received recognition from one of the world's top HIV/Aids scientists, Francoise Barre-Sinoussi. Barre-Sinoussi, who is IAS president, noted that Malaysia had taken measures to open up access to more drug users to obtain free treatment, thus helping to prevent new cases of infection. "Your government had taken a very important decision on that. Many countries don't have the harm reduction programme that Malaysia has. Indeed it is one of the reasons why we organised the conference here," she told reporters at the conference. Introduced in 2005, the programme encourages injecting drug users to exchange clean needles and syringes at public and private healthcare centres and putting them on methadone maintenance therapy. It has reduced new infection risks among injecting drug users from 60 per cent when it was first introduced to 30 per cent presently. Data shows that to date, the programme has reached out to 62 per cent or over 110,000 of the estimated number of injecting drug users in the country. -- BERNAMA