The UW Department of Global Health and MetaCenter for Pandemic Disease Preparedness and Global Health Security are partnering with Kenyatta National Hospital to host a webinar series, "Washington and Kenya: Opportunities for joint learning on the COVID-19 epidemic". The series, developed by Keshet Ronen and John Kinuthia in response to requests from our long-time partners in Kenya, seeks to share lessons learned from Washington’s early experience of the pandemic, and engage with clinicians, public health practitioners and policymakers in Kenya as they develop Kenya’s response.

The Simplifying HIV TREAtment and Monitoring (STREAM) study, led by Global Health professor Paul Drain and recently published in The Lancet HIV, found that point-of-care HIV viral load monitoring and task shifting significantly improved viral suppression and retention in HIV care, as compared to standard laboratory-based HIV viral load testing. This study was the first randomized controlled trial to compare rapid point-of-care HIV viral load testing against standard of care lab-based HIV viral load testing, which usually takes several weeks to return results to patients.

May is Mental Health Month, and the Department of Global Health is sharing an article from the Global Mental Health program, which features interviews with people from the UW community about mental health as well as information from relevant journal articles.

By Bill Foege

In the midst of a global pandemic with COVID-19, we seek lessons from the past and we try to define what leadership instructions might be useful today.